


A Study in Morals

by Kuronrko98



Series: Maladaptive Daydreaming Work: The Cube and Related Universes [1]
Category: Escape from Furnace - Alexander Gordon Smith, Homestuck, Multi-Fandom, Original Work, The Vampire Diaries (TV), Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Blood and Injury, Child Abuse, Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Misgendering, Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Sexual Abuse, Suicide Attempt, Underage Drinking, and also they make a friend, and plug events into existing universes, but ao3 is objectively the best place to post this, but i cant call it purely original fiction because like, i do use the names/personalities of existing characters, idk i hate it, is it really fanfiction if the whole point is everyone being a mental construct, its dumb, maladaptive daydreaming, okay this is weird because i have ALWAYS been unsure how to classify my daydream writing, this is the story of how jay learned they dont have to be what they were made to be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-04-28 19:55:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14456589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kuronrko98/pseuds/Kuronrko98
Summary: If you ask Jay, morally gray is an understatement.





	1. May, 2010, age 21

**Author's Note:**

> This one isn't from the POV of my main parame, but it is one of them. Jay's epithet among all of us is "The Scientist" and they live up to that pretty well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing involving sexual abuse or rape is particularly explicit, but it is more than implied.

Today feels wrong when I wake up. Sticky, hot, the same as every morning. Hands, everywhere, the same as every morning. Still, I manage to push it all down and feel nothing, exactly the same as every other morning. Still, it's there. The déjà vu of a reread page, a reoccurring nightmare fluttering in the back of my head while I bite my lip until I taste blood. 

Today’s a lab day.

I don’t have to stay in the crowded room long, with the fingers digging in my skin and the searing breath on my neck, my chest, my thigh. I stare at the ceiling with glazed eyes and wait. It’s a lab day. They’ll come for me soon.

The time between the grip on my hips, shoulders, ankles, wrists waking me up and the door opening to tell my visitors that I’m needed elsewhere is liminal. I know there are tracks of tears down the sides of my face, the liquid pooled in the shells of my ears. My eyes sting with the rest of me when I’m allowed to rise to my feet and follow the escort out of the room.

The feeling that something is wrong follows me out.

Distant shouts that I recognize ring in the halls. The compound is never quiet. Yells I can’t understand, a tune I swear I’ve heard before. It’s distracting, at least, from the imprints I still feel on my throat.

I stop noticing these things when we reach the lab.

Tchaikovsky lounges against a counter—

**_—my workspace he’s waiting for me—_ **

—with his son standing ramrod straight beside him. The young boy looks at me once, then averts his eyes. If it was just him, I would say something. I know better than to do that with his father around. As it is, Tchaikovsky pushes off from the counter to meet me and my escort in the center of the room. I turn my eyes down, noting the coat—

**_—my coat—_ **

—gripped in his fist.

Something pings in the back of my head, this also feels familiar, but I have to push it away. I can’t let his voice turn into the garbled mess everything becomes when I stop listening. I can’t risk that.

But he’s not talking to me. Not yet.

“Has she eaten?”

“No,” the escort answers, clinical. “We have her working a few hours before feeding, it’s a good motivator.”

“Well?” Tchaikovsky’s voice shifts, and I lift my chin slightly with eyes still downcast. “Today’s your deadline. Are you confident that you were _motivated_ enough?”

I breathe in through my nose, and when I speak my voice is soft.

“I am. It should—”

**_—too uncertain course correct—_ **

“—it _will_ work. We tested it, Sir. It works.”

He makes a sound, one I recognize as approval. Pride fills my chest, but I resist the smile threatening the corners of my lips and keep my gaze trained on that lab coat. I know, I know from the books, that it’s an endorphin response. It’s not real, none of it is real, but the pride still sits like a warm stone in my chest. The machine works. Tchaikovsky’s pleased. The others in white coats that I work with will put me on a new project and the cycle will start again.

I see the hand an instant before my chin is jerked up, eyes flashing up to see Tchaikovsky’s pale eyes boring into me. He’s too close for me to read his expression, his body language, and my throat closes up. I _feel_ his chuckle, dark and syrupy. I want to step back but _I know better than that_. His eyes flick away from me, to the escort, and back.

“Bring her back to my office after second feeding,” he purrs, narrowed eyes in conflict with his tone. “Special reward for the hard work.”

He releases me and brushes past, letting my coat fall to the floor. I don’t move. I find myself staring into the middle distance until I know he’s gone. Before I can even think about kneeling to retrieve the coat—

 **_—_ ** **my** **_coat—_ **

—Dominic holds it out for me.

I blink at it, then at him. I meet the child’s eyes, and the ghost of his father’s face throws my eyes directly down to the floor. I take the coat, mouthing a grateful platitude before moving to my work station.

And I still can’t shake the feeling that something about this is familiar.

I listen for the boy’s footsteps to leave, but they don’t. I hear nothing from him while I pull my clothes from a drawer. Nothing while I struggle through the stiffness to get dressed. Nothing when I shrug my coat on.

I turn back, eyes narrowed and back straight. Dominic doesn’t look at me, eyes trained on the floor. The escort has moved on. I sweep my gaze through the lab to see him checking on one of the children on the opposite end of the room.

“Did you really make a time machine?”

I jump, looking back to regard Dominic, who looks now looks at me. I force something I think is close to a smile, focusing over his head rather than on his face. “Yes, Dominic. We did.”

It’s wrong. Those words, I’ve heard them before.

I’ve seen this day before. I’ve watched it. Watched the scary man wait in the white room. Watched the sad lady walk in with another man. All of it, I’ve seen it all before.

Dominic asks if I’m okay, I think, but I can’t hear him right.

I turn my head to see a young girl, aged eight, staring at me from a cot. Her lank hair nearly covers her eyes—

**_—gray eyes—_ **

—and she looks like all of the other clones. She stares at me rather than the book held in one hand. One of many, scattered across the bed.

The book in her hand, it’s a text on the applications of cloning complicated organisms. It’s one of the books sent back from whoever has the machine we made in a distant someday. The eyes on the cover have always made me uncomfortable, even after they moved me out of the lab at night.

Before I can move, one of the men in coats matching mine stops by her bed, and she looks away. I don’t dare move, not wanting to be reprimanded for doing nothing.

“Put the books in here. You’ll get them back.” He drops a cardboard box on a bedside table. “It won’t take very long.”

“It’s today,” I murmur.

I look back to where Dominic was, but he’s gone. That’s just as well. A thirteen year-old likely shouldn’t be here. Especially not today. The girl and I make eye contact again, most of her books already packed away, and I remember what happens next. I know what I have to do.

I make a break for the door, ignoring the shouts following me. Pounding steps follow, but they change focus when the first explosion rocks the compound. I don’t know where I’m going. I only know that the third explosion will hit the lab, and that the girl will be shunted into the machine before she can see what comes of it all. 

I round a corner and bounce off of a black shape as the second explosion hits.

I land on my back, immediately staring into a black circle. A circle, a circle, a _gun_ pointing at my head. A voice behind the gun screams something I don’t understand. I don’t know if it’s an unknown language or if my ears have decided to stop working and I don’t _care_.

I don’t know what to do, so I slam my hands over my face on instinct.

And I wait. I know what happens when we run. We run and we get caught and we get shot.

_**Escape artists ain't worth the effort** _

Nothing happens. There's no flash, no deafening shot, nothing. I peek between my fingers. The gun still points at me, but it’s further away. A woman I’ve never seen kneels in front of me, wrapped in a bulky black vest. She looks back at the one holding the gun. I try to focus on her voice—

 **_—it shouldn’t be this hard_ ** **idiot** **_—_ **

—and I’m relieved when it starts making sense.

“… much older than the rest, but she’s not acting like this ring’s goons. They’d sooner take a bullet than risk being taken in alive.”

The third explosion sends dust drifting through the air from the direction of the lab, dusting the woman’s helmet. The one with the gun lowers it a fraction.

“I’ll keep going. You take her back to the others.”

The woman nods and pulls me to my feet. The instant the other one troops past us, she wraps her fingers around my wrist and drags me down the hall. My skin screams where she touches it, bruised and tender as it always is, but I don’t say anything.

Behind us, gunshots ring, and I try not to think about it.

We stop when we enter a room full of children.

Children with gray eyes and blonde hair. Most look more-or-less average for young clones in the compound. Frail, bruised, and clustered into a few groups scattered throughout the room.

“What are you—oh, you found another one.” A man with scars over his eye looks up from a stretcher to peer at us when we enter. He stares at me for several beats, then shakes his head and returns his gaze to the girl in the bed.

The woman looks at me and releases my hand. She says something, but I’m not listening anymore. Too busy watching the girl in the stretcher. Her glazed eyes stare at the ceiling, and her mouth moves in subtle patterns. Muttering. A common habit here, one I still haven’t broken.

But I recognize her. It’s Alpha. She has a room on her own and we draw her blood on every lab day. Her head lolls to the side and her eyes focus on me with a delirius smile.

“ _Had. Drew._ You should get used to past tense.”


	2. November, 2013, Age 25

I’m alone in the halls, head pounding.

This is something I’ve never had. I’m alone, it’s quiet, and everything feels empty. The mindless space held between my days running the show is gone, all of it’s gone, and the voices of my siblings have disappeared.

It worked. Jessica split all of us apart.

I remember the conglomerate, the  _ collective _ , our memories blurring together, but it’s fading like a dream. A good dream, a wonderful dream, but a dream all the same. If all of that is leaving, I can assume the other half of her plan worked as well. We’re all getting new memories of our own.

Dread settles in my chest, and I try to remember what we—

**_—I—_ **

—did yesterday. 

It’s getting warm out, so I spent most of the day outside to prepare for—no, wait, that’s not right. No. That’s one of the memories falling away into the darkness.  _ I _ , slept until evening and drank until the numbers in my books stopped making sense.

So I have a room, apparently. And a stock of liquor. It’ll come to me as time goes on. For now, I’ll see if I can find one of the others. Any of the others. Even Jeluha would be acceptable.

New memory #2: The angel’s name is Jaluha, and I don’t get along with her. Which means we all likely have names waiting for us to remember them. That we have the chance to squabble like a real family now.

I stop in the middle of the hall when a fizz of static cuts the silence of the hall.

“ _ Hey, everyone. It’s Jess. The human. You know what I mean. Everything’s kind of messy right now, so maybe we should meet up in the Lobby? _ ”

The air grows still, white noise gone, and I resume with a different location in mind. The Lobby is one of the two spaces this place moves around, space should bend me there soon enough.

I walk.

And walk.

I don’t know how long I traverse the halls before I run into someone else. Her wings, navy and black, press tightly to her back. I told her not to hold them in so tight: Her upper back already hurts enough.

“Jaqi.”

She stops, and her wings immediately loosen when she sees me. I see she remembers  _ me _ now, too. I’m surprised at her smile, but I don’t know  _ why _ she shouldn’t be happy to see me. If there’s something about me to be wary of, she evidently doesn’t remember it either.

“Oh, Jay, thank god. I thought I was lost.”

She does know my name, though, which I’m grateful for.

“Don’t be so sure you  _ aren’t _ .” I smile, slowing as I pass her, and she quickly falls into step beside me. “I’ve been out here for at least an hour. You’re the first person I’ve seen.”

“Do you know anything? You always seem to.” When the words leave her mouth, she makes a face. “Well. You know what I mean.”

I do, I think.

“I know the split was successful, and that we’re getting the memories Jess guessed the Cube would provide.” I furrow my brows, trying to recall more. “The way she put it, it will piece together lives that didn’t happen and make them reality for us.”

“Like in Pokémon?”

I pause, flicking a glance her way. She sighs.

“You know, with Entei and the Unknown. They make the girl’s dreams real. Jess tried writing a story about it?” When I don’t respond to that, she shrugs. “You need to get out more.”

“If you remember real things that I don’t, that confirms something else entirely.” I turn my gaze ahead, trying again to recall things that evidently didn’t happen to me anymore. “We’re forgetting the things we did as a collective.”

She sighs again, and her wings beat the air behind us. I recognize the dramatic habit and file it away as another thing I know. “I thought so. I can’t remember what it felt like. I know I should, but I can’t even remember if it was good or not.”

“Neither can I.”

We fall silent and remain that way for the rest of the walk.

When we turn the corner and see the blinking neon of the Lobby’s sign turning the hall into a dead end, Jaqi streaks on ahead. I don’t speed up at all. If anything, I slow down.

I know that I did something. The knowledge lurks in the back of my mind, even if I don’t know what it is. There are so many of us, I’m certain someone knows. Someone will remember what I did that keeps me confined to my room. That leaves me hungover and thinking I’m not welcome company.

So, what is it?

My heart races in my chest when I step through the door Jaqi left ajar. The murmur of conversation doesn’t stop when I walk in. Most of them don’t even seem to see me, too distracted by Jaqi’s explosive entrance.

All of them but Jess. The original. This is the first time we’ve met face to face, as far as the last dregs of our old memories go, but when she leaves the crowd to join me by the door I ‘ _ remember’ _ that she was mad at me. Her grin doesn’t betray that now, however, so I return it with my own attempt at a smile.

“You did it,” I say mildly. I look past her, at the group still welcoming Jaqi. A few look away when they catch me looking. Bitter gazes divert back to the crowd. Hm. I flick my eyes back to Jess, finding her just as welcoming as before.

“I know!” She rocks back on her heels, her age showing. “Awesome, huh?”

I jerk my head in a brief nod, and check the crowd again. More of them watch me, and this time most of them don’t look away. I should probably go.

Jess makes a sound beside me, and I see her gazing at the crowd as well. Something sharp rises to the surface in her eyes, and those glaring at me flinch away. This, I don’t need to search in my canned memories for.

While she may be young, and the one that resides in the real world, she might be the least human out of all of us when she comes here. Those hard gray eyes turn on me, and I can’t keep my heart from leaping into my throat.

She laughs, the rest of the sound in the room fading behind the sound. I can only see her face, everything else blurring. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes anymore, and I remember a tired eleven year-old in a stretcher that could pluck the thoughts directly out of my head.

“Relax, Jay.”

The chatter returns, and my gaze drops to the ground. I don’t respond. I don’t know if I should. Jess laughs again, softer, and this time it comes as a comfort.

“I try not to pry, but it’s so easy to slip in and out of your heads,” she explains. I lift my eyes, but still don’t look at her. After a moment, she adds, “I know privacy is important to you.”

The way she says it—

**_—soft dangerous like a snake—_ **

—sets off a warning in the back of my mind. Something isn’t right here. And then—

**_—progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is progress is  prog—_ **

—I remember.

I remember and I spin on my heel to push through the still open door. I hear Jess call after me, but no. No.

**_No no no no no_ **

I can’t do this today. I can’t face them. I can’t. The first door I see, I shove my fist in a pocket and use a key  _ I know is mine _ to open it.

The room it spits me out in is at once familiar and foreign. Haphazard stacks of books dot the room, seemingly at random. Half assembled projects lay on every surface. The blankets from the bed strewn into the middle of the floor remind me that I rolled out of it in a hurry this afternoon.

A door in the corner of the room hangs open a crack. Light flickers through the sliver, and I feel sick. I can’t breathe, can’t think, because they know. They all know what I’ve been doing and that scares me more than what I’ve done.

I cross the room, picking over shattered glass and bloodstained rags. Empty bottles of scotch line the wall, hidden from the entrance by a desk. A book lies on the floor, pages torn from the bindings and scattered around the room, in the beam of wavering light. It’s the only one I kept from the compound.

_ Applied DNA Replication in Mammalian Life. _

I pause at the door, knowing what I’ll find. Something I’m capable of, something that I would expect myself to have done even if the memories weren’t floating like garbage through my mind. The more I remember, the more my hands itch to be working on something. Anything.

**_Something familiar._ **

I take a breath.

I close the door.

I need to move. This place isn’t secure anymore.


	3. January, 2014, age 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *gasp* they were roommates.  
> Except without all of the good things associated with that.

“And you’re sure no one can cross the line?”

I turn my eyes on the nectar addict. She drums her fingers against a countertop, and I can see the dark remnants of her black blood under her nails. A glance shows corresponding tracks on her forearm.

If I really looked, I’m sure I could find more of those.

I look away and jot down a reminder to do more tests on inactivity. I only remember that I need to answer her question verbally when she slaps her hand flat against the counter. When I flick my eyes up again, I see whirling vortices of darkness where gray irises normally rest. Shadows flicker and fold around her, cooling the room around us.

I gaze at her, level, until the black drains away. The shadows slowly fade, and she’s left with an exhausted glare rather than violent irritation.

“Aster, Grey, and I put a lot of effort into keeping the island isolated,” I finally say. She nods, but her hostility doesn’t waver. “You have two different kinds of magic keeping them out and I made sure our keys will let  _ us _ back in if we leave. That’s the best anyone can do with the resources we have.”

No one wants to come here, anyway. The only one I can imagine trying to seek either of us out wouldn’t be held back by anything we put in her way.

“It’s not intruders I’m worried about.”

I grimace.

“Don’t worry. Your  _ children _ won’t be able to leave the perimeter.”

It doesn’t exactly appease her—I don’t think she’s been  _ calm _ since April—but her nails continue their assault on the counter and she looks away. I wish I had been able to find somewhere else, some _ one _ else, but this she's the only one willing to be anywhere near me. Or that I’m willing to be around.

At least I know that she’s annoyed with me just as much as she is everyone else. She’s done plenty of things to keep her conscience as muddied as mine.

I sigh and snap my notebook shut. The drumming falters, but doesn’t stop. I feel her eyes track me until I close the door to the dilapidated kitchen behind me.

This entire manor is falling apart. It groans in the ocean wind, not stopping the worst gusts from slicing through the walls. Shrieks from the wheezing doctors are audible from two levels below. Through a gap in the ceiling separating this floor from the one above, the ruined face of a grinning child stares down at me.

It makes a move, but freezes at a bang from the room I just left.

“ **_Don’t you dare._ ** ”

_ I _ still, a shiver lighting upon my spine at the low growl. When I look back up, the creature is gone. I don’t waste any more time, retreating down the rotting hall to find the elevator. At least I know exactly what to expect down there.

I was pleasantly surprised, on my first visit, to find this elevator to be new, streamlined, and in perfect working condition. The walls directly around it are reinforced, though the building sags around the new addition.

I was  _ delighted _ when I first saw the space Jess was allowing me to use in exchange for organizing a security system. The last two underground levels hold real equipment, materials to work with, and an abundance of space I don’t have to fight the Cube for.

And I’ve negotiated an unlimited access to Jess’s blood.

We call her an addict, but the convenience of the term ignores the explosive amounts of pure darkness being produced in her body. She’s become something I’m certain others in the Cube would refer to as a monster. 

I see her as an opening to a new avenue to steer my work down.

* * *

 

“You really think this is the answer to your problems?”

I don’t look back.

Perry, the original, stands in the doorway to the farthest flung corner of the manor I could find. Even my host doesn’t disturb me back here. I doubt she even tripped a sensor when she skipped herself into my private space.

“This is the only thing I’m good at,” I answer. Even so, I lay the shining scalpel on a tray. Soon my gloves follow, glistening with nectar-black blood. “It’s not for me, and it’s none of your business.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“How many universes have you created and destroyed, all because you were bored?” I look back in time to see her flinch back. “Whose fault is it that I have nectar to do tests with? Whose fault is it that we have broken and battered souls in the Cube wanting to be free of its effects?”

“That’s not—”

**_—who let a man like Tchaikovsky exist in our home?—_ **

She makes a sound, confused, in the back of her throat. “What was that?” Panic. That was panic in her voice.  It’s working. She can’t hear what I think anymore. It’s working and I’m safe.

I sigh and leave the tests to be run when she’s gone. The subject should be fine until I get back. Perry watches me with wide eyes as I approach.

“Nothing. It was petty and mean, don’t bother yourself with it,” I murmur, pulling the door closed behind us. “I doubt you're here to discuss ethics. What do you need?”

She lets me lead her away from the worst of my labs, not answering right away. Her hands twist around each other, a nervous habit. When we pass the third door in the long corridor, she sighs.

“Do you have any idea where Connor could be?”

I don’t know if I react outwardly, and I don’t know how much the scrambler hides my thoughts. I don’t know if she’ll be able to tell if I’m lying. I don’t know anything, because this is the first time I’ve seen her since I made the damn thing.

“He came to see me the night he disappeared,” I say, slow and careful. That, at least, is true. “I didn’t know he was going to leave, though, so I really couldn't say.”

That’s the lie.

I know exactly where Sawyer went. I know, with less precision, where he is now. I know why he left. I know he intends to come back. I know he shouldn’t be trusted as he is now.

I know that if she knows any of this, she would go looking for him and be consumed by her own memories. She’s too unstable as she is now. I can almost see her pulling apart at the seams.

“Damn it,” she mutters. “I thought maybe, now that we’re all separate, someone would know. You were my last resort.”

Her voice strains, and I finally stop at my makeshift kitchen. She could probably use a few minutes of rest. She hops onto a stool, bowed head pressed against clasped hands. Someone who didn’t know her might mistake the gesture, her silent mutterings, as prayer.

As someone who  _ does _ know her, who has been somewhere close to where she is half of my life since leaving the compound, I’d say she’s trying to avoid a panic attack. Talking herself out of falling apart.

Sawyer was right, she could probably do with a few months without leaning on him.

“You built this place from nothing.” I turn away from her to rummage through what I have. How old is she now? Fifteen? “We’re all here because of  _ you _ , for better or for worse. You're doing that without him. You’ll be fine.”

“I am,” she breathes. “I am fine.”

“I know that isn’t true.” I turn back with a couple shot glasses in one hand and a bottle of Fireball in the other. “Because you saved me as a last resort. Normally, I would have been your first stop.”

She averts her eyes, slouching closer to the countertop. I pour our shots, push one towards her, and place the bottle between us. She makes no move to reach for it, but I  _ know _ that’s why she’s here. I might not be the only one with alcohol in the Cube, but I’m one of the few without an interest in either the politics of this place or getting in her pants.

I grimace at the thought and try to steer this the right way. The last thing she needs is to go back out there and do something she’ll regret. Something she’ll hate herself for.

“Having some whiskey in the safety of your own head won’t kill you,” I assure her. “I’ll make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

“Coming from you, that isn’t comforting.” Still, she straightens up and neatly knocks back the shot. “But Fireball is expensive topside. I’ll take what I can get.”


	4. July, 2014, age 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second half of this has a helluva lot of blood, heads up.

“Look, I don’t know why you wanted me to come.”

I glare at Perry, the one and only original human, and down the last of my eggnog. Christmas in July, what a _joke._ They shrug. That’s all they do. Shrug every five seconds, indecisive and flaky. Full of _maybe_ s and _I don’t know_ s.

“I haven’t seen you in months.” Their brow furrows, and they frown at me when I ladle myself another cup of eggnog. “How much of that have you had? I heard someone spiked it, so maybe—”

“That was me,” I cut them off with a laugh that sounds wrong. “If you’re surrounding me with people that hate me, god knows I need to be drunk for it.”

“They don’t hate you!”

“ _Look_ ,” I start again, suppressing the urge to giggle again. “I’m fine. I don’t need your hovering. I don’t _need_ you to check on me.”

“That’s not what this is.” Ah, there it is, the _serious business_ voice. Marginally better than the _I’m the real me and I care so much_ voice _._ They pause, and I have no idea what that face is about, but the _voice_ is gone when they open their mouth again. “I missed you. I thought we were friends.”

I snort into my cup.

“I don’t have friends, Perry.” I immediately feel bad for saying that when they flinch. _God,_ they're trying hard. I take another drink and make an addendum. “I guess you’re close, though. Semi-friend. Almost friend.”

Their smile reminds me that they aren't even sixteen yet. That makes me pretty pathetic, I suppose, my only two friends being more than ten years younger than me.

And being different versions of myself, if Sawyer really counts as that anymore.

Oh _shit_ , he hasn’t talked to them in months. That’s what this bullshit is about.

“Really, though, I don’t think they hate you.” They gestures across the counter to the full _Lounge_. Damn vampire rebranding the place. I don’t follow their gaze, taking another long drink.

“If you think that, you haven’t been listening. Or looking.”

“Hey, Jess.”

We both turn to face the new voice. A blond kid, maybe a little older than Perry and wearing a ridiculously adorned pair of sunglasses, approaches with a mug. He doesn’t hesitate to serve himself some eggnog. I snort at the dissenting sound they make at this.

“As if you have any room to judge. What’s he gonna do, go for a drunk joy-ride?”

“You don’t know my life,” he says, taking a drink. “It’s still early. Could go on to get caught by Dream Cops and go to Dream Jail. Have to live the rest of my Dream Life with my past behind bars hanging over my head.”

He keeps talking.

And talking.

I glance between him and Perry, but they just grin. The story gets more elaborate, and the more I refill my glass the less I follow it.

“Outta the way!”

The kid cuts off in the midst of a tangent that I stopped listening to a long time ago. He side steps to let the demon through. Jezabeth grins at the two of us behind the bar, fills two glasses to the brim, and whisks back to her table.

“Uh. Where was I?”

Perry looks far too much like they're going to tell him, so I drop a hand on their shoulder to _stop that_. “The part where I get _the hell out of here_.”

Perry looks up at me with a pout, but I shush them. I can’t stay here anymore with the rambling kid with the reindeer shades or the glares or _Perry_ with their  _forgiveness_ and _friendship._

“I’m surrounded by kids, and I already, ha, already did my job by making you let them relax.”

“Ah, so you’re the one with the juice.” I let my head to loll around to look back at the boy. “Might have to hit you up later.”

“‘M not a pusher. Not for children, at least.” I finish the last of my—

**_—I don’t know how much I’ve had—_ **

—drink, and pat Perry’s shoulder a couple times. “Thanks for the, uh, invite? I’m leaving.”

Before they can answer, I’m blinded by the fluorescent light in the lab.

“Jesus, what happened to you?”

I spin on a heel, overcorrecting and almost spinning right off my feet. Jess, the other Jess, the one with the nectar, stands at a table doing. 

Doing.

Something. With nectar, probably.

I need my own place.

I mumble about the party, Perry with their _voice_ and their weird _friends_. And about the rum. Especially the rum. Jesus, when was the last time I drank?

Jess says something, but I’m already staggering for the door. I need to sleep. _Now._

* * *

 

“That’s impressive.”

I don’t have to look back to picture Jess’s scowl behind me. I’ve been waiting for this. She’s been… spiraling lately. I think the demon in her blood is starting to get to her. The universe she originates in is one of the few Perry stuck her nose into that I’m well-versed in.

It doesn’t end well for the ones playing God with the nectar.

I try not to think about it, checking the vitals on the beast in the cage. I think I’m close to finding a way to reverse the damage, to bring things back under control. A few more tests, a few more weeks, and I’ll reach out to Perry’s friends.

Maybe she’ll stop trying to keep me from doing this when it comes out a success. That’s what I’ll tell myself while the other clones I’ve tainted with nectar growl and shriek in cages against the wall, the few I’ve managed to revert to approximations of what they were laying limp (but alive) in cots down the hall. It’s what I tell myself when I look in the mirror and see the look in my eyes that reminds me so much of

**_Tchaikovsky._ **

“You’ve been making berserkers just to—what?” The biting voice jerks me back to the present. Her tone rings alarm bells in the back of my head, but I’m more than versed in keeping that in check. “Turn them back? Make them human again, _weak_?”

“Can you still see through their eyes?” I ask, eyes still on the chart I’m filling. “The ones I’ve pulled out of the nectar’s hold?”

She doesn’t answer, but a growl reverberates from her and each of the occupied cages in the room. I flick a glance up at the largest of them, the one I’m checking. The anger in its eyes doesn’t do anything to quell the nectar-leaking grin it wears.

“Is that necessary?”

“With what you have, you could be doing so much more.” Her voice moves, slowly, behind me. To the side. “You could turn yourself into something better. You could _be_ something.”

I pause.

My pen hovers over my notes, my eyes narrowed, and I consider her intent. What do I know? She has the demon, the darkness, that wants to spread and reproduce. In her lucid moments, she wants to prevent that. Right now, based on her current connection with the corrupted test subjects, is not one of those moments.

Eventually, I press the pen to the page and complete the thought.

“I’ve never been after power. Everything I have done here has been for the collective.”

“ **_Pity._ ** ”

I look, instinctively, to my left at the sound of rending metal. Soulless black pits and a demented grin barrel toward me, and the most I have time to do is lift an arm—

**_—bad idea bad idea BAD IDEA—_ **

—before collision.

I land flat on my back with the creature she released sinking teeth in the flesh of my arm. I can’t hear, can’t think, nothing registers but the

**_P A I N_ **

short-circuiting everything. I don’t get a chance to even try fighting back before it’s gone. The weight is gone, the creature’s gone, and—

 **_—nononononononononono—_ **  

—my _arm_ is gone. Blood pulses from the stump, and all I can do is watch. I know I won’t last long with this kind of blood loss. I know that. I know. I know.

A feather-light hand touches my shoulder and the bleeding stops. My muscles lock, and my brain shorts out again, lungs forgetting how to work, but the bleeding stops.

I slowly turn my head to see Perry standing behind me, fingers barely brushing my shoulder. Just enough to keep me from bleeding out. Just enough to keep me alive. I can’t say anything, so I turn my gaze down to stare at the bloody stump again.

That’s okay.

That’s okay.

I choke something out, but it doesn’t sound like a word.

“Shush. We’ve lived through worse,” Perry murmurs, soothing words. A tingle against the skin they touch tells me they're trying to transmit the sentiment directly, but I think the scrambler keeps it from reaching me. “You’ve fought through worse.”

I can’t answer. I can’t find the words to refute or agree, so I don’t. I find myself saying something else instead.

“How did you know to come?” Cracking words, voice thin. I can’t summon the strength to try to course correct. The consequences—

 **_—no no don’t think about it—_ **  

—aren’t worth the struggle.

“I might not be able to hear _you_ , but her intent—” They shudder. “I felt it all the way in the Room.”

Silence.

“What did you do to her?”

“Sent her upstairs. I don’t think she’s slept in a while, so she’s doing that now.”

More silence.

“Can I sit?” they ask, hesitant.

I look back up to them. They chew the corner of their lip, a nervous habit we share. They're worried. Scared, maybe? I answer by trying to struggle to my feet.

They retract their touch, and I hear the liquid splatter of my blood on the concrete in the instant before I grasp the hand they offer. They don’t let go when I’m upright, and I don’t expect them to.

I think the shock’s starting to fade.

Which means my arm is going to start hurting _very_ soon.

I stand still in the middle of the room, surveying what I’m leaving behind. Twelve living nectar corrupted humans. One—

**_—what is that._ **

I stare at the body of the berserker Jess released. Nectar still spreads lazily on the concrete floor, a liquid void. It doesn’t look like it was ever alive. A mess of off-colored meat, bones jutting out at odd angles.

“Jesus,” I mutter, then lurch for the door. I don’t have much time, my shoulder’s already starting to ache.

“You’re not the only one with secrets.” They squeeze my hand, and I don’t have the energy to tell them it frays my nerves more. “I know exactly what it means to do the wrong thing for the sake of our home.”

“Who’d’ve thought, perfect Perry turning my clones inside out. ‘Least I know why you haven’t shut me down yet.” I can’t keep the barbs or the wheeze out of my voice as the ache worsens.

They tense at my side, but their voice is gentle when they speak. “I’ve always been a neutral party on your research.”

I snort, and they shoot me a dirty look.

“I’m serious. It was a lot, yeah, when I first found out, but…” They open a door when I stop in front of it. “No one would be singing my praises if everything I’ve done came into the open, either.”

I don’t answer, trying to think through the white hot _ache_ where my arm should be long enough to gather—rather, to stumble around and tell Perry to gather—what I need and bring it to a table in the center of the room. The relief of slumping into a chair is short lived. I’m out of time.

I hiss out a breath, unable to hold in my pained gasp any longer. I feel, in my hand, vibrations that tell me they're trying to help, so I nearly scream, “My pocket, right side, the—fuck, just—break it. Break it, break it, break it, break—”   

A crack sounds and it’s instant relief.

The pain is gone with the effects of the scrambler, whisked away by Perry. For now. They won’t be able to stay forever, but I assume they’ll stick around long enough to help me not die of infection or blood loss the second they leaves.

“Of course I’m staying,” they say. Sharp. Stung.

Right, they can see what I’m thinking again. How handy. I visualize what I need them to do, what I _can’t_ do with one hand missing and the other uselessly trembling from blood loss. They raise a question or two, clarifications, more with concepts than words, before we reach an understanding.

The entire exchange lasts a few seconds, at most, then they jump into action.

Their hand leaves mine but never loses contact with my body, skipping up my arm, across my shoulder blades—

**_—not good not good can’t breathe—_ **

—and finally settling their fingers on the torn edge of my blood-stained coat. They ask why I still wear it and I don’t have an answer other than it’s what I’ve always been. Another scar I haven’t allowed to heal.

They help me shrug out of it all the same.

I keep my eyes trained on the white mass of fabric at my feet while they get to work. I should have thrown it out years ago. Better late than never.

I don’t feel the pressure of the wrappings on my arm, not until they leave my side with an image of gauze floating in the space between our minds. The pain doesn’t come back at the broken contact, but a prickling itch forces its way through the barrier hey set up.

They nudge me for a report on my condition, and the only answer I can give is the visual of a growing red stain on the wrap they already placed. A brief moment of panic, then they’re back at my side with enough gauze to reduce the need to leave again.

But I keep my eyes on the stump, even when they cover the red stain with another pad and several layers of gauze secured around my neck and torso. I hardly feel their touch anymore, I hardly feel anything. I don’t know if it’s their numbing assurances or the sight of the wound.

It’s gone.

I feel sick.

The feeling disappears the instant the thought crosses my mind. I tear my gaze away from the web of dressings to find Perry watching me. They don’t touch me, letting the healing process continue at its own pace.

They must have found their way deep into my head to be able to keep me from feeling without physical contact. The don’t confirm or deny that. They don’t say anything.

I sigh. “Your friends will have to wait awhile before I can treat them.”

“My—?”

I project an image of their friends from Furnace, the ones twisted from the work of Cross and the nectar. Understanding wraps the image, and they look at me differently. It’s subtle, but still there.

They look back to my arm, shows me a reassuring picture of the blood still not leaking through, and that new look comes back.

“Will you miss anything here if you leave?”

I blink at them. I think of everything here. The clones, I can’t leave them or Jess will use them to create more of her monsters on her bad days. The small supply of her blood I still have, for another pet project. The berserkers I’ve yet to heal.

They're already nodding.

Floating in my mind’s eye is a wide room lined with tables, doors leading to a hinted warren of similar spaces. It takes me a second to realize they're also talking and blink the image away.

“… promise to keep me updated. Block me out of your head, whatever, but let me know before you do something that could get you lynched.”

“I can’t promise that,” I say automatically. I _feel_ their disappointment. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

I don’t. Think. They meant that to sound as accusatory as it did. The only thing I feel is resignation and traces of hurt. That’s nice. Knowing _exactly_ what they want. _Exactly_ what they're feeling.

Nice change. Something I don’t want to push away just yet. I don’t know what they can see in my head now, but if they're  _asking_ it means they're giving me the choice to withhold the information.

“I’m not a dick. You have a right to privacy.”

I sigh. Says the person with their mind sunk halfway into mine. I’ll play their game, though.

“I just—” I look back at my arm, and this time her barriers don’t keep my stomach from flipping. I close my eyes and try to dismiss the memories I’m dragging up.

**_His face it’s right there_ **

Perry instantly withdraws from my mind, flinching back. The itch comes back, bringing with it a dull ache, and for once it’s a relief. A welcome distraction. “I don’t work underneath anyone. You’re strong enough that I can’t take that risk.”

She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t reach out to me again. We sit in silence, and I watch as the gauze slowly grows pink. Then red. Through the remaining haze of Perry’s false comfort, I note that I’ll need a transfusion to function before they leave.

I blink, and they’re wrapping another clean layer over the evidence of blood still leaking from my arm.

And another.

I don’t know how many they add before they tap the edge of my mind again and the aching itch, itching ache disappears under a haze of numbness once again. I turn my head to see them eyeing the ceiling nervously.

“We should get out of here before she wakes up. I’ll make sure everyone gets there safe.”

“Thing,” I correct. I rise to my feet, turning my back on them.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not worried about the nectar kids, I know you wouldn’t let them stay here.” I don’t look back before heading for the door. I need to raid the kitchen before we leave. “Beyond that, every _thing_. Inert clones can hardly be called people.”


	5. November, 2014, age 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter deals with a suicide attempt, general warning.

With a few early stage salves and intravenous cocktails taking advantage of various temporal effects in the Cube, which Perry fought me using every step of the way, I’ve managed to speed up the healing process. It should be ready for a prosthetic now, and I’ve been looking into some unorthodox sources. My old designs, built when I wanted to distance myself from my appearance— 

**_—my past—_ **

—would be sufficient, but Perry suggested something else.

Something from a show. They connected with the universe and brought back books, plans, even an example. It will do nicely, if I can get it to work.

And the new lab is better than the glimpse they gave me on the island suggested. Clean. Bright. Enough room to keep me from worrying about space for some time. And safe. It’s the closest to perfect I could hope for, and certainly more than I deserve.

The protections I put around the nectar addict’s island were a joke compared to the ones around this lab. It listens to the Cube, lets me know when someone wants to find me. If I let them in, they’ll find my door. If not, they won’t.

Then there’s the hallways and the passcode for the next three doors.

And another permission based door.

The key was leaked  _ once _ on the island and that dashed any chance of permanent privacy. A move would have been overdue even if I hadn’t overstayed my welcome. Now, I’m here and I don’t have to worry about anyone peering over my shoulder. I have all the space I could ever want. 

I have back rooms to put the things I don’t want anyone to see.

Of course, Perry could walk in without even trying, but that’s a given.

The other perk to this place is the connection to the memory sectors. The walls are thinnest there, just needing a passcode and a single permission. Or a key, but the kid wandering around out there won’t accept one.

Sawyer’s an idiot.

He’s an idiot, won’t listen to sense, and won’t come back. It’s been—what? A year since he last set foot in the Cube? Since he talked to his supposed best friend without either of them being in danger?

He has no problem bothering me.

“How am I going to do it, though?”

I groan, looking up from my prototype arm to glare at him. “I don’t know. I have real problems to deal with. If you want to split yourself, you should talk to  _ Perry. _ ”

He stops pacing to actually look at me. “You know I can’t do that.”

“Actually, no, there’s no reason not to tell them.” I flick my gaze back down to tighten a bolt in the elbow. “They’re losing it, but they’ll  _ still _ be able to help more than I can.”

He starts pacing again, ignoring me.

“Take your search somewhere else, then. There’s nothing I can do.”

He still doesn’t answer, so I get back to my repairs. This is what happens when I involve myself in Perry’s business. I get saddled with  _ Sawyer _ to listen to him pity himself.

The doorbell rings.

Sawyer freezes.

I sigh, drop the screwdriver, and stretch to flip open my monitors. A stranger wanders the halls in the main Cube. He holds his hands in his pockets, slouching, and I raise a brow at the triangular sunglasses the man wears.  It’s weird seeing someone older than me in the Cube.

“Oh, it’s Bro.”

I jump, finding Sawyer standing over my shoulder. He leans past me and taps the screen to zoom in on the man’s face.

“You know him?”

“Well, no, but—” He glances at me. “You didn’t keep any of Jess’s memories related to Homestuck when you split?”

I shake my head.

“Well, did you ever meet Dave Strider before you turned into a recluse?”

I pause, looking back at the screen. “Who?”

“Oh.” He shuffles, and when I look back he’s scrolling through a phone. “I have some pictures, hang on.”

He flips the phone around to show me, and— 

“I’ve met him. At the summer Christmas party.”

“I’ll pretend that made sense,” he says, pocketing the phone again. “But, yeah, that’s his older brother. Most folks call him Bro as a convenience thing.”

“Bro?”

He nods. “Yeah, his real name’s Dirk, but he shares that name with the younger version of him, who we actually call Dirk. He’s pretty cool, I guess.”

I gaze at him, filing that information away. “I’ll look into all of it later. I’m going to let him in.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’m curious. You should get out of here.”

He leaves my side in an instant, and I flip the switch to open the way for Bro to find the lab. Sawyer pauses at the door leading to the memories, and I watch him quietly.

He looks back. “You still want me to come back to test that arm later?”

I nod and he’s gone. Well, time to get online with my guest.

* * *

 

##  Age 28

'Bro' has been in and out of the lab since then, and I can't find any reason not to let him do so. With permission, he's taken a table in the corner of the first room to set up a computer and a sewing machine. I don't pry into his business, even if he does wander to ask about my own work. The work I'm finally able to look at again, after two weeks local time.

Perry brought me someone to install the prosthetic, in the end, someone versed in the technology. The entire time, they stood to the side without speaking. Their eyes, dull and tired, pointed at a wall. They brought the pair, a hunched old woman and a bright eyed young mechanic, and left without a word when the process was finished.

The procedure would likely have been difficult if the soothing waves from Perry hadn’t been there, though.

The visitors didn’t ask how I lost my arm, or about anything else in the lab. The mechanic did ask about the design I made, compared it to her own. She said our stylistic choices are different.

They told me to give it time to heal. I let it do just that for two years, using the machine I constructed in—

— ** _the compound_** —

—and a pocket universe.

Still, I’m not completely used to working with an arm that isn’t mine.

“Damn it,” I mutter. I let the snapped clamp fall on a tray to the side. I force myself to step away, hands raised. The motion reminds me of my sore shoulder.

I’ve been at it too long, that’s all. I need a break. Need to rest my eyes. A glance at the clock tells me I’ve been working for eighteen hours, almost twice the longest work day I’ve had since beginning my recovery. I look back at the tests to see all of the subjects alive, breathing, and seemingly free of nectar.

While the results are effective, I don’t think fugue states are particularly safe in this line of work.

I’m ready to work on Perry’s friends now, though. There hasn’t been a failure since I left the island. I should—

At first, I think the tremor might be from overworking myself. Seeing and feeling things that aren’t there. Then it happens again, trays rattling throughout the room.  I barely manage to catch myself on my hands and knees when a more violent shake throws me to the ground.

What’s happening? What the  _ hell _ is this? We don’t get  _ earthquakes  _ in the Cube! The ground lurches beneath me again, and this time I hear static-laden screams rising from the intercoms.

**_Perry._ **

The sound wipes all thought, all feeling, all  _ urgency _ from my world. The walls, oh, god, the walls bleed together, a blur I can’t fight through. Perry’s screams echo until they’re overtaken by static and there’s nothing but white noise.

Then, darkness.

—

It must be the agitated beeping that wakes me. Familiar, but never a good sign. I’m losing a subject, or the tremors broke something in another room. Clean-up will be a pain.

I don’t know how long I’ve been lying with my cheek pressed against the floor by the time I start to feel it again. I can’t move, can’t even open my eyes. It doesn’t feel real. Then, of course, it  _ isn’t  _ real.

None of this is real.

With that in mind, I force my eyes open. It makes little difference, revealing another wall of black. This one, however, shimmers like an oily river. I’m staring into the gasoline horizon of the In-Between.

I didn’t think the Cube could transport me out of the lab.

The erratic beeping withdraws into the limping beat of a heart monitor. That doesn’t sound good, either.

I push against the ground, almost surprised when I’m able to drag myself into a sitting position and take a look around. I haven’t been in the In-Between in some time, even if I were to count my brief visits to the memory sectors. I’ve  _ never _ come here to find such a large crowd.

They all seem to be in various states of disarray, like me, with some still lying flat on the ground. I don’t have to look very hard to assume that this is everyone. Everyone in the Cube.

Many of them are my siblings, versions of Perry milling among the crowd. Others stand in groups stemming from their own original universes, speaking in hushed voices. Even Sawyer stands a good ways away from the bulk of the group, wringing his hands and gazing up.

I follow his eyes.

Perry.

I slowly rise to my feet, not taking my eyes off them. They hover several yards above the crowd in hospital attire, several wires and tubes trailing from their arms and chest just to disappear in the darkness around them.

This isn’t real.

But this doesn’t feel like anything I’ve felt before, either. Someone has to know what’s happening.

I sweep my gaze around the group to find that no one in the nervous crowd has acknowledged my arrival. On a good day, that would be a relief. This isn’t a good day.

I step up, and a platform appears beneath my feet. My voice is magnified when I clear my throat, and all eyes turn on me. I wait for murmurs to die out, finding that not a single gaze turns hostile.

“Who was the last one to see them?” I call.

A ripple runs through the crowd and one of the vampires pushes forward alongside Izaya. I struggle to come up with the former’s name until they stop several feet away. It’s Damon. Damon Salvatore, though I believe Perry softened his edges when they brought him here.

The haunted look in his eyes tells me as much.

“What happened?” I ask, much softer. They glance at each other. “Do you know?”

Damon nods.

Izaya flinches. I focus on him when I ask, again, what happened.

He doesn’t answer right away. I gaze at him, then at Damon. The vampire turns around to face the crowd.

“Did anyone know about the old pills they had stashed away, or was that the best kept secret in this damn place”

I freeze.

**_No_ **

I can’t. Think. The implications of that question bounce through my head and tear everything else away. I look back up at the original human, the one that made this place. The reason we’re here.

**_My closest friend_ **

If they were dead, we would be gone. These could be our last few minutes.

I can’t breathe.

Izaya speaks among the clamor of the crowd, so quiet I almost can’t hear him, and I grasp onto that. I have to. I let his words fill the empty space in my head.

“Damon thought I could help. That I could—” He maintains eye contact with me, even when his voice cuts out. I wait, tense, for him to continue. “I couldn’t. I begged them, I  _ begged _ , but they just. Downed the whole bottle.”

He breaks the connection, turning his eyes down to the ground. I see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything. I stagger off the platform, eyes roving the edges of the crowd.

**_There_ **

Connor Sawyer stands not too far away. He backs further from the group, eyes still on Perry. He doesn’t see me approaching, or doesn’t react if he does. He doesn’t tear his eyes from them until I jerk him close with a fist tangled in the front of his shirt.

There’s fear in his eyes. Wide, tear-filled, gray. 

**_Exactly like theirs_ **

“ _ Where were you? _ ”

His mouth opens and closes once, twice, three times.

“I didn’t—”

**_Not good enough_ **

My right hand screams at me when it connects with his nose. I let him slip out of my grip and stagger back. I don’t hear him, though his mouth moves. I advance closer, but he doesn’t make any move to flee.

This time a catch a few words.

“—ead, I deserve it.”

Before I get a chance to find out how much I agree with him, a hand clasps around my wrist.

**_L E T  G O_ **

They do.

And the entire crowd falls silent.

I turn back to find all eyes on me again, and this time it pulls me back into my head. It reminds me where we are. Thought with intent is no different than speech here. I may as well have shrieked at them.

I focus on the one directly behind me, one of my siblings. They don’t look impressed, and it takes me a few seconds to parse my thoughts and identify which one they are.

The vampire. Jess. The newest one. The one most like  _ them _ .

“This isn’t helping,” they mutter. “We need to figure out what to do when they come back.”

I stare at them.

“When they—” 

They roll their eyes. “Do you really think they  _ won’t _ come back? Izaya and Damon weren’t done when you decided to fly off the handle.”

I glance past them to find the crowd milling together again, soft discussions buzzing in the air. Their voice is gentle when they snap me out of it again.

“Brennan convinced them to tell their mom. Sounds like we’re on our way up to Portland.” They turn back for a second, and I see Damon nod behind them. “We won’t know more ‘til they wake up, obviously, but we gotta assume they  _ will wake up _ .”

I peer over my shoulder. Sawyer’s gone. I swallow, gather the last of my shattered front, and nod when I turn back to Jess.

“Any ideas, then?”


	6. January, 2015, age 28

“Since when do you make house calls?”

Perry doesn’t turn around, but the affection in the air is almost enough to soothe my nerves. They continue shuffling papers, turning pages, while I catch my breath in the doorway. It’s an endeavor to find the Room on the best of days, and I have a nagging suspicion that they're being purposefully evasive.

“I wouldn’t have to if you answered your messages,” I puff, stepping in and letting the door close. “Have you left this place since you got back?”

They don’t answer, scribbling in one of the many journals scattered around the Room. They hum, and I regret leaving the scrambler behind. That soft sound in the back of their throat rebounds in my head, more chilling than it has any right to be.

“Relax.”

The sound is innocent once more, reflecting the affection floating heavily in the air around us.

“I doubt anyone can _relax_ right now.” I don’t miss their back stiffening, or the scratch of their pen faltering. “Are you just going to pretend it never happened?”

They finally turn back, and the sudden chill leaves gooseflesh prickling up my arm. The love in the air remains, thick and sickly sweet. Their smile is soft, kind, something I expect from them, but their eyes.

**_Those eyes_ **

Dark voids, pits in their skull. I didn’t think I’d see that in _their_ eyes again, not after the last time, but the evidence is right there. They aren’t even bothering to hide it.

But I’ve seen what nectar can do.

“Nothing happened that I can’t control.” Their gentle voice snaps me back into the present, and their eyes look human again, albeit much darker than normal. “It’s not as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be.”

I stare at them.

“Jesse.” Their brows quirk at that, but they don’t say anything about the barely-there tremor in my voice. “You swallowed a bottle of antidepressants. You tried to _kill_ yourself. That’s a _big deal._ ”

“That’s not what happened.” They turn back around to sift through papers once more. Do they really believe that? “I was tired. Weak. It won’t happen again.”

“So weak you think that _nectar_ is the answer to your problems?” I hiss.

They chortle, and the sound ricochets like a bullet against my skull. “What was it you said? ‘It’s the only thing I’m good at?’ and ‘It’s none of your business?’”  

“This is different,” I say automatically, before I get a chance to feel the sting of their words.

“Is it?” they ask, soft

**_and dangerous,_ **

an echo of my own self-doubt. I clench and unclench my fists at my side and plow on.

“It _is_ , and for you it isn’t true.” Through gritted teeth, I spout another of their platitudes. “This does no one any good, not even you.”

They don’t answer. They don’t even look back. The taste of the air, formerly so welcoming, has turned sour. This is bad. For the first time in a long time, there’s nothing I can do to hide the fact that _I don’t know what to do_.

“It’s none of your business,” they repeat. I don’t know if I really hear the warning, but it hits me like a pin in the center of my forehead. Clear as crystal. “So you don’t have to do anything.”

“This is everyone’s business.” I turn back to the door, beyond unsettled. “If you don’t see what’s wrong here, someone else will.”

“That’s not a good idea,” they say lightly. The quality of their voice changes, and I feel their tug in the back of my head.

I want to run. I want to tell the vampire, Astor, or Gray about this, anyone that might be able to talk sense into them.

But I can’t.

I can’t because when I turn around I see them holding up a silver journal, still busy with their shuffling. That’s mine. The one detailing my days, automatically filled with each breath I take.

And I know I can’t tell anyone.

* * *

 “So you’re the scientist.”

“That’s a pretentious way to put it, but—” I cut off when I turn around and register that the voice isn’t one of the three I’m used to. That there’s someone I didn’t invite in my lab.

 **_In my space_ **  

And he’s familiar. Barely. Dark hair, ponytail, the non-flesh I wouldn't recognize if I didn't know it was there. The memory it calls up, shadows, so much blood. He wears a mercenary uniform. The Scouts. The one Jess was a part of when they were a kid, before—

 **_—_ ** **me,** **_before Tchaikovsky—_ **

—the compound. And he’s watching me from atop a table, wearing a placid smile while I stare.

“How did you get in here?”

He grins and pulls a key from his pocket. Another fractured memory, and I recognize him. I thought I lost all of Jesse’s old memories, but this one must be too strong. Too much to separate.

I lean back against my desk and sigh. May as well get whatever this is over with. “And where exactly did you get that, _Kane?_ ”

“Lifted a copy when I last brushed elbows with Jessica.”

“That’s not their name,” I mutter. “You shouldn’t be here.”

He shrugs. “I was told to come. Got a call to take on some new recruits, orders said they would be here.”

New recruits?

He tosses the key to me, and I catch it, dumbfounded. It’s one of Jesse’s personal keys, it could take him anywhere. It could take _me_ anywhere. I look back up to see his smile gone.

“She’s the one that called. I didn’t speak to her directly, but they funnel anything related to her to me.” His serious demeanor clashes with the ceaseless bloody smiles bubbling in my memory. “If the rumors are true, she would still be good in this line of work.”

“Jesse is an impulsive, erratic, _idiot_.” I pocket the key, trying to temper my glare. “They’re reckless enough without you dragging them back.”

“Well,” he muses, moving from his perch to take measured steps between the tables. “She’s the reckless idiot that erased Alfred Furnace from the Cube. Permanently, from the sound of it.”

They did _what?_

Triumph adds a skip in his step as he comes another row closer, but a dark spark catching on the other side of the lab diverts my attention. I start forward before he gets a chance to get cocky.

He turns when I brush past his row of tables, a delighted sound in his throat at the sight of Jesse.

The record scratch in my brain keeps me from registering anything else from him when they fully coalesce and promptly collapse to the floor. More of those sparks flash in the air around their body. I disregard the other new arrivals, kneeling at Jesse’s side.

A single touch tells me the nectar is gone, slipped through the cracks of universes, leaving their skin cool and clammy. The steady rhythm beating against my fingers on their neck releases anxiety’s grip on my throat. I rock back on my heels, clutching at the front of their shirt to keep from falling back.

“Damn, I should have known better than to doubt her word,” Kane mutters behind me. A rumble from the nectar-changed men in suits surrounding me, which I vaguely register as laughter, prompts me to peer over my shoulder.

Kane pats one of the giant men on either shoulder, beaming and babbling. New recruits, hm?

Jesse shifts on the floor and I jerk around to face them again. Relief floods my system, making my head spin. I barely hear Kane curse behind me, barely notice the entire group vanish.

They jolt, sitting upright before their eyes even have the decency to blink open. I gaze at their irises, and I think I succeed in hiding how _happy_ I am to see that clear gray again.


	7. April, 2015, age 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has really heavy themes of rape and emotional domination/manipulation, so keep that in mind.

I always realize I’m dreaming at the same time.

My back hits the surface of the counter and I almost think I’ll fall through it. Every time, it wakes the dead-asleep half of me up to remember that this isn’t happening. That it’s been nearly seven years since the compound. This doesn’t happen anymore.

That makes it worse.

It doesn’t erase the taste of vomit from the back of my throat or the alcohol on Tchaikovsky’s breath. It doesn’t warm the metal edge of the counter, bring light to the dark lab, or soften the grip forcing my hands against the wall.

It just means the details are sharper. The distant growls become once-heard orders in my ear and I can taste my own fear. I urge myself to wake up, but the distraction earns a spark of stars behind my eyelids when the back of my head slams against the metal counter.

 _“That’s what I get for making you smart.”_ The harsh whisper sounds directly in my eardrums once more, and tears prick the corners of my eyes. _“You think you can get away with shit.”_

I

**_know better_ **

than to let the sob threatening to push past my chest through. I’ve seen this dream get worse too many times to do more than screw my eyes shut and try to remember how I made my mind go blank. How I could stare at the wall and not _feel_ these things.

I almost have it figured out when my stomach _drops_.

The smell of alcohol doesn’t disappear when my eyes snap open in the dark bedroom. I stare at the ceiling and my heart stutters at the sound of breathing.

I can list on one hand the number of people able to get in here without my help.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I croak. “Come back in the morning.”

A chuckle.

**_N O_ **

“After all the trouble I went to to find you? I don’t think so.”

I try to sit up, but I can’t move. My limbic system settles firmly on _freeze_ rather than fight or flight.

When I hear footsteps, I find myself praying that this is another dream. A new one rather than the ones that have been coming less and less frequently over the years. Praying that, if it isn’t, my fear is strong enough to reach Jesse through the scrambler’s interference.

“Nothing to say?”

I close my eyes.

I breathe in through my nose.

I open them and push myself into a sitting position, gaze locking on the barely there figure looming several feet from the side of my bed. I breathe in again, finding the center I had struggled so hard for in my dream with an ease that chills my blood.

“I thought you were in the Himalayas.”

The figure shifts, and that soft laugh sends a shiver down my spine.

“How long were you expecting me to let my property run from me?” he murmurs, that _dangerous_ voice telling me to be careful. My vision swims, and the thick fear in my throat keeps me from speaking. “Did you think I’d forgotten about you? You know better than that.”

I flinch.

Fingers twine through my hair and twist to force my head around. My blessedly silent tears blur the shadow of his face, but I know he’s too close. His breath, the cloying scent of stale alcohol shattering the distinction between dream and reality, hits my face dead on.

My mouth moves without my permission.

“Something went wrong, didn’t it?” The gutteral sound I make when he tightens his grip sounds a million miles off. I'm talking back and the only thing that keeps me from falling apart is the knowledge that it will make what comes next worse. “I’m easily the hardest clone to find, but I’m the one that built everything you have.”

**_Shut the fuck up_ **

But he merely barks out a laugh and releases me. I slump back to lean against the wall behind my bed. I wish I could _see_ him, gauge what's going through his head. “Who taught you to bite back?”

“Don’t test me.” I slowly inch a hand out, toward my side table. “If you want your _property_ to be easy to reclaim, I have terrible news for you.”

“Are you in any position to be making threats?” There’s still that amused lilt in his voice, and I _know_ that’s a bad sign. “This rebellious streak will be _fun_ to break you out of.”

Another thrill of panic rises to scatter my thoughts, and when I speak again my voice wavers. “The th-threat wasn’t on my behalf.”  

“Oh?”

My metal fingers clink against the device on the side table. Shifting footsteps tell me that he heard it too, but he can’t stop me from snatching the scrambler and crushing it in my fist with a thick crunch.

I _feel_ Jesse immediately tune into my emotional signal.

“What was that?” he demands, heavy footsteps stopping at the edge of my bed. “What did you do?”

“I told you.” I laugh, a shaky sound that doesn’t stop when a hand snares the front of my shirt to jerk me out the bed. “This won’t be easy for you.”

The light blinks on and the first things I catch a glimpse of are those _eyes_. Furious, cold fire boring into me cuts off the signal my brain was giving my lungs to _breathe_. They leave me, though, at a breathless sound on the other side of the room.

Jesse stands in the doorway, one hand still poised over the light switch. They remain frozen there, staring at us, until the grip on my shirt loosens and I collapse back down, shaking on the edge of the bed.

Their eyes flick to me, then back to—

“Tchaikovsky,” they choke out, their arm lowering back to their side. “What a surprise.”

“ _There’s_ the alpha. I thought you were dead.”

To my surprise, they smile. Their demeanor shifts, either a recovery or a new mask turning the chilling gaze they’ve used against me so often on him. “Listening to rumors will get you killed one day.”

“Rumors led me here. I’d call that a win, wouldn’t you?” He places a hand on my head and laughs when I cringe back. I stare at Jesse, though. I can’t feel anything from them, not even an idea of what their end-game could be

“No.” Their smile, fixed, still doesn’t reach their eyes. “Not for you, at least. If you know what’s good for you, you would leave.”

“Five years, and you think you’re hot shit, huh?”

Nails dig into my scalp and Jesse’s eyes narrow. Their finger barely twitches, and Tchaikovsky vanishes. The ghost of his hand remains atop my head for an instant, pressing me down.

Then Jesse kneels at my side and even the smell of his breath is gone.

“God damn it,” they hiss. They hover a hand over my shoulder, then think better of it and let it drop back to their side. “Are you okay? Did he _do_ anything?”

I shake my head, unsure which question I’m really answering.

“I should have known he was in the Cube, I should have _felt_ him here.” They rake their fingers through their hair, and I catch a glimpse of the emotions they’re keeping from me. Just a second’s view of fear, anger, helplessness. Nothing good.

“Even you can’t watch everything at once,” I murmur.

They let out a shaky breath, and I don’t know if they even heard me. “How did he get in here?”

I let my eyes fall out of focus, running the short list over and over.

**_Jesse Sawyer Gray Bro_ **

Jesse might be impulsive, but I can’t see them ever _inviting_ someone like Tchaikovsky into our lives again. In the end, they’re just as scared as I am even if they have the ability to fight back against him.

**_Jesse Sawyer Gray Bro_ **

“I doubt he’ll stay away forever. Do you want me to stay with you?”

**_Jesse Sawyer Gray Bro_ **

I can’t imagine Sawyer having a reason to contact Tchaikovsky, no matter how stupid he is, and Gray isn’t that petty. She understands running just as much as we do.

“Jay? Are you okay?”

That leaves one option.

I push off from the bed, striding for the door with Jesse on my heels. It’s time to look into what my visitor has been doing in my lab.


	8. May, 2015, age 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tbh, if you aren't prepared for hints about past abuse and violence at this point, I dunno how you got this far.

I don’t know how long I spend inspecting the files. Folder after folder of images and videos. None of them labeled, the first containing captures of the different times his brother died. Then some more depicting similar situations of several other children. Some of them I've met, touched base with. 

The next few, pictures of others in the Cube. Some of my siblings, some of those same kids. More deaths. I watch a video of the brothers fighting, Dave ending up bruised and bloody by the end. This folder is full of videos with similar thumbnails.

I open one more folder and immediately close the window.

I don’t want to know what else is on here.

I’m surprised at the numbness in my chest, no fear or nausea, just cold numb floating in my diaphragm. I do awful things back here, terrible things, but there are some things even I would never do.

These have to go.

All of it has to go.

I press a button on the side of my chair, and a humming drone is at my side in an instant. It waits, quiet, for instructions. I peer up at it distastefully, knowing the _drone_ idea was a poor one.

I only need it until I can get the new program working.

“Download all of my user files to one of the independent mainframes,” I say, surprised that my voice doesn’t reflect my unease. “Then shut the public system down.”

It repeats the command back to me in a stilted voice, and I give it the go ahead.

It glides toward the back halls. I should try to get some work done for today, maybe let everyone know about the shutdown. I know some of my siblings won’t be happy if they lose their connection out of nowhere.

I bring up my personal email, starting a new message and setting it to send back twelve hours ago. They likely won’t even notice the difference between this and the public message board, and maybe I can keep certain parties from seeing it.

 

 

> _EMERGENCY SHUT DOWN_
> 
> _A virus will be discovered in the public system at 10:22am, after an unknown duration of activity. The damage is extensive, so I’m shutting down the system and wiping it completely. If you have any files relying on the public server, I would suggest saving them to a computer or USB as soon as possible._
> 
> _I’m looking at you, Captor. Don’t send me complaints if you lose your precious viruses. Which we obviously need to have a conversation about if you released one on the public server._
> 
> _It should be back online within a few days._
> 
> _Thank you for your patience._

I hope that red herring is enough to keep anyone from poking around. At least, everyone but Captor. I’ll need to contact him before he tries to look into it on his own.

“What’re you up to, kid?”

I stiffen, only able to hit send as a blessing from my spasming fingers. The tone has been repeating in my head for weeks—

 **_—smooth joking dangerous—_ **   

—and it leaves me staring at my computer screen silently. The voice is different, familiar, something I’ve gotten used to, but the tone is the same. Bro chuckles, and the thrill of panic turns into a stab of fear.

I can’t move.

I don’t hear footsteps, but he practically _appears_ behind me in the reflection of the computer screen. He grins, but I can’t read his intent because of his _glasses_ , why are the Striders always wearing—

**_—it’s a mask a mask to trick you—_ **

—sunglasses?

My eyes lose focus. I concentrate on one thing, and one thing only. My voice must remain level. I’m putting things in the wrong context because I found him out. There’s no reason to believe he knows that I know.

“Rebooting the system. It should be back up in a few days.”

“Hm.”

He doesn’t move from his place behind me. I force my eyes to hone back in to watch him in the reflection of the screen, and I can’t _tell_ what he’s looking at. The drone should be done any minute and it can eject him from the lab.

I sure as hell can’t. If the glimpse in that video I saw is any indication, I don’t think I would be able to do anything even if I could unlock my muscles. I’m not meant to fight. I’m a different kind of weapon.

I’m too tense, brain running through old memories, old tactics, old plans I never used. There was never anywhere to run, never anywhere to go, just waiting for everything to be over—

 **_—stop stop stop—_ **  

—and that isn’t an option now. I need.

Huh.

I blink and I’m the only one in the screen’s reflection. With a jerk, I manage to turn my head and find the room empty. I press a button on the table, one of the only radio-based items I have.

“Scan the lab for life signs.”

A moment of silence.

“ _Scan complete,_ ” the stilted voice responds. “ _Eighty-two life signs._ ”

“Where?”

“ _Seventy in store rooms six through thirteen. Ten in active laboratory settings. One in room one._ ”

I wait a beat, then ask where the last one is.

“ _Final life sign has left the compound._ ”

I tense more, if possible. Too many reminders today. “Please refrain from calling the lab a compound, if you can.”

It doesn’t answer.

The banner rolling on top of the screen says the network is down. I think it was about time to do an overhaul anyway. I wait for my breathing to calm, my muscles to relax, and get to work.

* * *

In the past two weeks, I’ve started looking at every universe the Cube is attached to. Every universe, every new inhabitant of our home, I’m cataloging whatever I can.

I found out that Jarie shut Tchaikovsky down a few days ago. It’s good news, even better that they left him stranded in the mountains. The bad news attached to that, however, was Jesse’s new fall from grace concerning nectar. No one knows what’s happening in that universe as of now, so it’s best to leave it alone.

I’m finding conflicting reports about a few of the Striders, which is disconcerting. Nearly everyone claims that all of them are decent, ‘ _cool’_ as Sawyer put it, but some of the newer information…

Well, I need to look into it more.

The doorbell rings.

I flip the monitor up and immediately scowl. Bro stalks the halls, not bothering to hide his irritation. It could be the first real thing I’ve seen from him, or maybe another act. I watch for a few minutes, thinking he might leave, before I realize he’s shouting.

I turn the volume up.

 _"Open the hell up! That was valuable merchandise you destroyed, and I know you could get it back. I was set to make a_ killing!”

This time, my stomach does turn over, and I mute the feed again. I’d hoped I would be wrong, but I wasn’t. He was selling it. All of those pictures, videos, whatever else he had, he was _selling_ it and other people in the Cube were _buying it._

I tap the new button on the com in my ear.

“Are the defenses online?”

“ _Yes,_ ” the electronic voice chirps.

“Thank you.”

And I allow him into my hallways.

I can’t hear him, but the smug grin he flashes when he sees the door tells me all I need to know. He passes through it, and I watch him traverse the passages until he finds the door with a keypad.

He enters the old code and is rejected.

The doors lining the hall, including the one he entered, vanish, and walls block the path on either side. He spins to face the empty room. I turn the volume back up to hear my own voice playing over the intercom, much cheerier than usual after several shots of whiskey.

“ _Hey, Dir-_ **k** _._ Bro _. You, uh, you actually thought I would let you back in here. Okay,_ haha _, that’s funny, I guess. But no._ ” The recording clears its throat, and continues in a more clinical tone. “ _Consider yourself formally banned from my labs. If I hear about you using anything of mine to find, produce, distribute, or otherwise affiliate with any of the material I found on your server or anything like it, well.”_

There’s a clank, and the monitor glows bright with the fire filling the airlock. The subsequent words are almost lost under a drawn out shriek.

“ _Don’t worry. You'll survive this_ _. Whether you like it or not._ ”

The feed falls dark again, Bro left writhing among the remaining flames. He twitches and tries to get up, but even with his obsession with stoicism I still hear whimpers over the speakers.

“ _Remember this, next time you decide to take advantage of any of us._ ”

The intercom in the feed cuts off, leaving Bro’s pained breathing the only thing I hear before shutting the volume off again. I press the com.

“Escort him to a medic or a healer.” I can’t very well let him die if I told him he wouldn’t in a drunken stupor.

The drone responds with an affirmative, and I close the feed.

I think I should feel bad. I _know_ I should feel bad. It’s not something Perry would condone. It’ll confirm a number of fears among the residents of the Cube. The complaints will increase, surely, but that doesn’t make the satisfaction rising in my chest any less potent.


	9. June 2015, 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Strider shows up, and this one's a bit nicer.

The doorbell rings for the first time after a few weeks.

No one came after me. I would have thought attacking a resident of the Cube would have a crowd after my head. And considering how territorial everyone in that universe cluster seems to be…

Still.

The doorbell rings, and I look up from the metal torso on the table. I’m getting ahead of myself again, making a body before I even have a program to put in it.

When I check the feed, at first I think it might be broken. Darkness, for a moment, until it pulls back and reveals a fairly familiar face hiding behind a pair of aviators. Dave Strider.

But, no, that can’t be right. Dave’s just a few years older than Jesse, and this man has to be older than me. Thirties, at least.

One of the older Striders, then. Post-scratch Dave. The source material for his universe isn’t clear about what kind of person he is, but the reports within the Cube are fairly unanimous.

Then again, until two months ago, so were Bro’s.

I press my intercom. “What do you want?”

He steps back, a barely-there smile on his face. “ _I_ _heard you had some trouble with one of my bro’s older selves. Wanted to apologize. Be neighborly._ ”

I don’t answer, squinting at the screen. The Dave I met was nice enough, if a little long-winded. Although, if he knows what happened with Bro, that means someone told him. Considering the lack of pitchforks and torches, I’d assume that information hasn’t spread very far.

“ _Look, I’ll admit that’s not really why I’m here._ ”

I shake my head and lean back over the table to measure for the new part. This is why I shouldn’t work so late into the night, I make things in the wrong size and have to make another one.

“ _Jess told the kids about your labs a while ago, and they’ve been talking about it ever since._ ” I flick a glance up in time to see him scratch the back of his neck with a chuckle. A nice one. “ _I’m pretty sure Dave and Strider just want more of your liquor, but Dirk and Hal both wanted to check out your robotics._ ”

That gets my attention.

“ _But I get it if you don’t want company. God knows I wouldn’t want anything to do with us if I had just dealt with the biggest asshole of the bunch._ ”

I push the button again. “Asshole’s a bit of an understatement, don’t you think?”

He laughs, the kind that tips his head back with the sound. I smile. “ _Yeah, I guess it is. So, Striders ruined for you forever, or—_ ”

“Do you want to come in? Or are you just delivering the message?” I’m rewarded with a grin this time. He’s more emotive than either of the other two I met. It’s a relief to have at least some idea of what he’s thinking.

“ _If you don’t mind, man, it’d be cool to check the place out._ ”

I press the button to allow him in. I stay on the line to feed him the pass codes as he goes, though I’m already considering new combinations if I need them. Two months and I’m already letting another stranger into the place. I’m still elbow deep in a metal torso when he walks through the door.

“Huh.”

“What?” I straighten up, tugging gloves from my hands. “I let you in, didn’t I?”

“No, yeah, it’s just,” he peers around the cavern of a room, then turns back around to face me. “Rumors say you’re basically runnin’ a torture chamber back here. Gotta say, it doesn’t live up to the hype.”

I frown.

“Who’s saying that?”

“Wouldn’t exactly be a rumor if I knew who started it, would it?” He hops up to sit on one of the less cluttered desks. I can’t hold back a strangled sound in my throat, but not even a paper moves on the desk. “So, what’ve you got goin’ on back here, if it ain’t all dark and twisty?”

I think immediately of the rows of cots, of pods, of clones—

**_—more dead ends, likely—_ **

—waiting to have life breathed into them for more testing. I can’t say that, though, so I gesture vaguely at the barely-started body in front of me.

“I’m trying to make a self sustaining assistant to help me out.” The direction of his face doesn’t move, so I don’t know if he actually looks or not. “I need another pair of hands.”

“Why not ask for help? Plenty of bored people out there.”

“Ask people to come back to the torture chamber to help the sociopathic researcher?” I raise a brow. “Besides, I never said I _didn’t_ have anything bad enough to warrant rumors back here. It’s—”

**_—beneficial—_ **

“—safer if I keep most of it to myself.”

His brows shoot up over the rim of his glasses. “Geez, bit of a fatalist, ain’tcha?”

“I’ve earned the right.” I pointedly _don’t_ look at him until I finish pulling a sheet over the table. “Is it light sensitivity or an aesthetic choice?”

I realize the question is likely rude halfway through it. He doesn’t seem to see it that way at least, only appearing confused for a moment before adjusting the sunglasses.

“Both. Gotta have a sick pair of shades to be this great.”

I snicker, and he grins.

“Very modest.”

“It’s true, though. I’m a hero of legend on my planet. Killed a couple juggalo presidents and left my bro what he needed to save the damn multiverse, apparently.”

“Oh, I know your whole story, _Dave Strider._ ” I round the table between us and breeze past him to pick back up on the program. “You made a series of shitty movies, used them to make a social commentary, and turned yourself into a martyr.”

I drop into my computer chair, but spin it back to face him instead of getting to work.

“Legend, yes. Hero, maybe, though I would argue your brother claims that title more than you.” I'm heartened that he still wears a smile. “But I don’t think you _live up to the hype_.”

“Pretty sure that’s worthy of a mic drop,” he claims, pantomiming just that. “In my defense, callin’ my movies shitty says more about your taste than mine.”

I turn back to my computer and start typing. “That’s what you got out of that, that I think the movies you made—which I know are purposefully god-awful, so don’t start—were outplayed and idiotic?”

“So you watched them.”

My fingers pause over the keyboard.

“When I do research, it’s very thorough. I still think they’re objectively bad, Dave.”

“D.”

I return to typing, but make an inquiring sound. It’s good enough for him, I guess.

“I go by ‘D,’ to keep it straight ‘tween me and the other two. Shit, no, three now.”

**_Three._ **

“Three?”

He huffs. “Man, I dunno. There’s the weird orange sprite guy from an alternate timeline, I guess. Davesprite. And the two pre-scratch Daves.” 

He pauses, and I can’t help looking back. 

“See, here’s the thing.” His hands gesture as he speaks, and I watch them rather then his expression. “A couple months ago, Jess decided they _couldn’t_ decide what kinda dude Dirk was pre-scratch. Either he was the weird-ass prick we all know and love or he was a complete douche. So there are two of both of ‘em now.”

Oh.

“I need to catch up on all of this. All I get here is whispers.” I lose focus, eyes wandering out to gaze at the rest of the lab. There’s another Bro, then, and that’s the one I gave permission to come here.

He’s lucky that he didn’t try to visit before the other one did, then.

“If it’s cool with you, could I bring the whole Strider clan back here some time? Barring unnamed pricks, I mean.”

I grimace and turn back to my computer. How many of them are there? I make a mental tally of the ones I know about. Six? Strike that, five without Bro. That’s so many people, so many sunglasses, so many eyes looking at my stuff.

“Okay.”

* * *

“You’re working hard,” I remark.

I don’t look up from the computer, not bothering to double check the change of energy in the room. There’s no one else it could be, in the end, and they just keep getting stronger. Even with the scrambler on full power, I could feel them before they got here.

I’ll need to raise the interference threshold.

“Yeah, but at what cost?” Jesse groans, dropping into a chair beside me. They throw an arm over their eyes and languish until I stop typing. “I never want to see another blueberry again.”

“That’s what happen when you work at a blueberry farm.”

They whine and spin their chair around. They keep going, speeding up until the energy rolling from them in waves makes my head spin. I catch the back of the chair with my stronger arm and jerk it to a stop. I don’t feel bad for them when they yelp and momentum sends them toppling to the floor. They should learn to keep their head to themself.

“What do you want?”

They glare up at me, arms crossed.

“I was gonna apologize, but, like, do you really deserve it?”

Oh?

They don’t bother with the act of standing, appearing back in the chair. They’re already waving a hand dismissively before I can say a word.

“I knew Bro had been spending a lot of time here.” They pull their legs up and cross them, sending them on another lazy spin. “I should have warned you, you know, when we ended up with the worst version of him here.”

“ _Oh._ ” I laugh and turn them to face me again. “He deserved what he got.”

“Well, yeah.”

And I thought they would be pissed.

They reach up to tangle their fingers in the string of their necklace. A plain pentacle hangs next to a single iron key. They pause when I bring my hand to my pocket, unthinking.

“That’s where that went,” they note. “Where’d you get it?”

I hesitate, but ultimately draw the matching key from my coat’s pocket. I’m sure that if we set them side by side, they would be the same in every way. I keep a tight grip on it, not willing to give it up.

“Kane.”

They flinch, and I file _that_ away. It’s always good to know the weaknesses of the most dangerous person you know.

“I see.”

I wait to see if they’ll ask for it, but they don’t. They hardly need two of them, I guess. I fidget under the silence, finally turning back to the computer and laying the key on the desk.

“Anyway, uh.” Their voice comes out higher than before, and they clear their throat while they stand. “Yeah. Sorry about Shadow-Bro. Jarie might kill me if I leave them at work too long, so…”

Right, the Striders.

“As consolation for letting trash into my lab _several_ times,” I say, not looking back from the computer. “Tell me something.”

“Yeah?”

I chew the inside of my cheek for a moment before deciding on a question to actually ask. “How likely is it that there could be more splits in the Striders?”

I feel them probing around the edges of my mind, but the scrambler still holds against them. What they’re looking for, I don’t know, but they end up snorting behind me.

“Outside of Dave and Strider’s time shit, not at all. The splits are more likely to re-fuse than any of the others are to break apart.” Their footsteps signal them retreating, but they keep speaking. “The others are pretty solid. I think you’d like Hal, if he actually lets you take a look at him, and—”

The door closes and cuts them off, though that same tickling in the back of my head tells me they’re still trying to go on.

I smile and shake my head, pushing away from the desk. I doubt I’ll be getting anything else done here today, not with the unsteady set of the Cube while they’re working in the warehouse.

There’s something about this summer. Not exactly wrong, but definitely different.


	10. July 2015, 28

There are eight Striders, as a matter of fact. Six of them came.

The Dave I met at the party was, evidently, the one raised by the Bro I _didn’t_ burn alive. At the time, he was the only young Dave in the Cube. I’m glad I have a history dealing with convoluted temporal and biological maps. The way they explain it feels rehearsed, but is that really so surprising?

Most of what they have to tell me, I already know from my research (if reading a comic can be counted as research), but it’s good to hear it directly.

Everyone with the same names have come up with identifiers in their time here to keep conversation easier, and I’m grateful for that. It’s the same thing Perry did with all of our siblings, which I guess makes sense since all of this is coming from them.

Dave, Strider, Bro, and Davesprite are from pre-scratch Earth. Strider/Bro and Dave/‘whatever expletive suits the mood’ make up the mirrored pair of pre-scratch ‘brothers.’ Davesprite is something else altogether, a game construct mixed with an alternate timeline version of Dave. And a crow.

He didn’t come, though, so I can’t ask about it. I have a feeling that might be why he stayed away.

D, Dirk, and Hal hail from the post-scratch iteration of their universe. No one says anything about how the program obtained a seemingly-human body, and I don’t ask. Dirk and D don’t seem to be as close as Strider and Bro. I can understand that.

I think.

I tap my fingers against my thigh to keep myself calm with so many _people_ in here. I can’t see any of their eyes, and that makes it a little worse. In such a bright room, I’d never ask them to take the sunglasses off, though.

D’s the only one not peering around the rest of the lab, though all but Hal stand fairly close. The AI drifts a little ways away, looking back every so often. As long as he stays in sight, that’s fine.

“How long have you all been here?”

Strider identifies himself with gesture. “Davesprite and I showed up right around when Jess first read our dumb comic. Back in, what? Twenty-eleven?”

“That’d be about right,” Dirk picks up, inspecting an inert drone. “You were only here a few months before me, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And Hal popped out of the ether that summer.”

“We got here a little more than a year ago,” Bro says, lifting a fist to bump the one D already has raised.

“And you’re acting like you’re the hotshot new guys on the block,” Dave adds with little inflection. “I’ve been here maybe two months. Get outta the goddamn way”

Dave bickers with the older guys, though I notice that I’m not the only one not letting myself look too closely at Bro by the time Strider joins the banter. Hm.

Dirk still holds the drone, but he gazes out over it. I follow his gaze to see Hal peering at the screen I’ve been laboring over for the past few months. I don’t realize I’m moving until a hand—

**_—shit shit S H I T—_ **

—lands on my shoulder. I nearly choke, spinning to find those _sunglasses_ watching me _too close to me_. The conversation nearby pauses for an instant before resuming a little louder. Dirk immediately lifts both hands in the air, stepping back.

“Shit, sorry.” He keeps his hands lifted, almost lazily, but it’s a snapshot of something I’ve seen plenty. I guess I know where Perry and Sawyer got the calming gesture from now. Or did he get it from them, living in their head for so long? “You good?”

I force an exhale, force myself to calm down—

 **_—pathetic pathetic_ ** **—**

—enough to communicate.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” At my words, his hands return to his sides. I manage a smile. “Did you need something?”

“Oh.” He nods in the direction I was walking. At Hal, I realize, when I look. “I was wondering if we could look around. Heard you have some cool shit back here. Maybe…”

He gestures vaguely at my metal arm.

I angle it away from him without thinking, and he doesn’t push the subject. I avert my eyes and consider the request. There are many rumors about my labs. The things I’m willing to show visitors might disappoint, but I can show him something. I turn and start for the Hal, still gazing at the computer screen. “Follow me.”

Hal looks up when we stop behind him. He gestures at the screen. “Look familiar, dude?”

Dirk moves forward to peer at it, and I have to physically stop myself from preventing that. I’m being _personable_. These people are _safe._ These projects are for me, can’t be used against anyone, they aren’t like—

 **_—shut up don’t think about it shut_ ** **up** **_—_ **

—my old programs.   

“Huh. Where’d you get the imprint of yourself?” he asks, directing my attention back to the work in progress program. I assume he’s talking about—

“It’s not me. I pulled the latent identity of the Cube from the memories. They aren’t far from here.”

He makes another soft sound, and when he backs up to face me, it’s with the closest thing to a grin I’ve seen from any of the Striders other than D. “If it wasn’t such a _shitty_ idea, I would say it’s awesome.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Hal cuts in airily, waving a dismissive hand. “Just because _he_ doesn’t like the artificial entity—”

I like the sound of that term.

“—he created doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it.”

Dirk’s smile disappears, turning on the AI. AC. AE? “Fuck off. I was working with theories that had already been tested and I obviously still managed to fuck  _something_  up to make you.”

“We’ve been over this.” Hal pushes his sunglasses onto his forehead to reveal unimpressed _black_ eyes with a thin red ring where his irises would be. I wonder if he’ll let me take a look at them. Maybe bargain a look at my arm in exchange. “It’s no one’s fault you were _thirteen_ when you made me.”

Christ, that’s right.

“I have no intention of ending the project,” I say, and they both turn back to me. I’m almost distracted by those _eyes_ , but I manage to control myself. “But it might be helpful to have a few people who know the technology and its drawbacks to keep things from going out of control.”

Dirk doesn’t respond at all, but Hal’s lips slowly spread into a smile. “I’ll help.”

“You will _not_ ,” Dirk hisses.

“Let’s not rehash the autonomy argument.”

Dirk shakes his head and brushes past me to stride toward the others. I watch him go up until he stops halfway there and turns back.

“I’ll do it.” He grimaces and jabs a finger at Hal. “But only to keep him from doing something stupid.”

* * *

Jesse slipped into the nectar _again._

This time, somehow, they managed to keep it more of a secret. They’ve been in contact with _Sawyer_ , but they haven’t so much as looked at him since fetching me. So, I have both of them leading me through the In-Between to a different universe.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect, with Furnace being _dead_ this time, but this wasn’t on my radar at all.” Jesse doesn’t look back, explaining their adventure. “I mean, waking up in a field, Stranger in my head and nectar in my blood, wasn’t a good day.”

“You took his place?” I pause, watching the oily darkness around us sway with our words. “And you’re going back?”

“Oh, the game is over.” Connor stops to look back at me. “We’re just taking advantage of the situation at this point.”

“What _exactly_ are we doing, then?”

Jesse stops abruptly further ahead, fishing in their pocket. A door appears when they pull a glinting key out, and they turn back to wait for us. “We’re making some insurance.”

I sigh and join them at the rusted door.

They pull the door open, and it leads to familiar lab space. My old work room on the island. Shining gurneys dot the room, the far wall lined with counters and cabinets.

But, no. This one has more. The floor bears stains of both human blood and the black of the nectar. An ornate desk I’ve never seen before stands next to the fading door, surface clear save for a layer of dust. The island is a universal constant for the world the nectar comes from. This isn’t our addict’s home, it’s a construct that will likely collapse when the rest of this universe iteration does.

“We need to make our own nectar,” Jesse explains. Their voice is strange, and I nearly choke when I look away from the room itself to face them.

Folding and unfolding shadows overlay their entire body, shrouding them in darkness. The shade jitters, a much more agitated version of the mere copy the addict carries around.

“Christ.”

They glance to the side and swipe their hand through the air in front of their face to reveal wide, black holes where their eyes should be. It isn’t an improvement, not when the pure black blood drips lazily from the corners of the vortices.

“Sorry. Since the game ended, I’m holding the place together with Cube junk. Means I can keep this thing from actually getting into my head.” Their smile—too wide, _far_ too wide—drips with more nectar when they pause. “It doesn’t like it, but that’s tough shit.”

“What happens to it when the universe falls apart?”

They shuffle nervously.

“I’d rather not talk about that while it can hear. It might be contained, but it’s still a slippery bastard.”

I nod and take another look around the room. Sawyer trudges into the room with arms full of papers. I didn’t even notice him leave.

“Okay, here’s what we have so far. All the notes on the original mix and the red stuff,” he says, dumping them on the desk. “Do you have any idea what you want out of this, Jess?”

They look to me as if _I’m_ the one that asked.

“I’m not exactly sure yet. Something that’ll even the odds against someone like Cross.” They scratch their jaw, which sends more ripples through the shadow. “Without being able to draw on the Cube, I’m nothing here unless I turn to nectar. We all know how that usually turns out.”

I run a finger over the surface of the desk, trying to appear thoughtful. I know exactly what they want. They want something to let them be powerful, capable of fighting Cross as soon as the crimson nectar would, without destroying who they are. Without changing their appearance. They don’t want to have to waste the kind of time it takes to groom someone to be strong _and_ remember.

I know.

And I already did that.

There’s more to it, of course. I found the part of the demon’s blood to cause self replication. It latches onto marrow and creates more. It’s smart, it listens. It works fast, letting you make weapons with your own blood.

I can’t say that, though, or they’ll want me to retrieve it now. They’ll follow me. They’ll see _how_ I got my end result. Jesse claims to be neutral on my research, but there’s a reason I asked them to lock my records in the Room away after their blackmail play. There’s a reason they agreed.

I wipe the dust from my finger on my shirt, nodding. “We should get to work, then. Go ahead and put these notes in the desk, we’ll take the whole thing to the lab.”

I turn to Jesse, trying not to flinch at the flickering shade. I hear more than see Sawyer getting to work on the papers while I try to find a delicate way to word this.

In the end, I don’t have to.

“Before we go, we should try to bleed as much of the Stranger’s blood as we can.” They beckon me towards another door, and I follow. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to ask the addict for any of theirs.”


	11. September 2015, 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm at the point where this stuff isn't on tumblr anymore. I'll probably be catching up on there? Eventually? But I want to have all of my writing on here at some point, so I'm putting a priority here.

“This is a bad idea.”

I ignore Dirk and pick up where I left off. It’s a shame Roxy couldn’t make it, she normally heads him off when he tries to stall.

“It’ll be contained here, and we’ll see how it goes. Twelfth time lucky, right?”

“No one says that,” D calls from the table he lounges on. Why is he always sitting on everything but my chairs?

“Just start it up.”

I do just that, directing a thumbs up at Hal without looking up from the computer.

It’s running.

No one says anything for a few minutes. When nothing happens, I groan and fall limp against the back of my chair. I’m not used to having an audience when something doesn’t work.

Hal sighs.

“I told you we should have found better hardware. I didn’t find anything wrong with the code that time. I would say I missed something, but I think we all know the probability of that happening is such a low figure—”

“ _God, will you shut up?_ ”

I shoot upright, making an unholy sound in the back of my throat and slamming my hands on the desk. It’s _working_. “Hello?”

“ _Yeah. Hi. Jay, right? And that was…_ ” It pauses. Hal crafted its voice from a few hundred recordings he procured from others throughout the Cube. It sounds disturbingly like Jess, but that’s fine. That’s more than fine. “ _Based on the pretentious probability talk, I’d hazard a guess to say Hal?_ ”

Dirk snorts to my left.

“ _Who else is there? I’m relying on audio here, help me out._ ”

“You wanna keep up the guessing game, or are our names fine?” D calls from his perch on the table, where he now sits upright.

The program remains silent for a moment.

“ _That_ is _a hard one. You Daves all sound so similar. Based on emotional patterns and inflection, though, I would say the post-scratch iteration. Goes by D, correct?_ ”

“That thing’s good.”

“ _Thank you._ ”

I grin. Finally, it’s working. We’re online, and I can get back to work. I was starting to think we’d never get here. I turn to Dirk, surprised to find him smiling too.

“I thought this was a _bad idea_ ,” I tease. “You look fairly pleased with yourself.”

He shrugs.

“It is. Doesn’t keep it from being cool, though.”

“ _Ah, post-scratch Dirk, too? Why are you slumming it with them?_ ” I nearly answer, a laugh threatening to bubble out, but it goes on. “ _The things I have_ seen _, looking through the history and reputation of this lab made me think it would be fairly empty._ ”

My smile disappears.

I took a snapshot of the Cube’s identity for this months ago, right before D first showed up here. It has no way to know that the talk is starting to come around. That I haven’t been alone in the lab for more than a few hours at a time since July. That I haven’t been working in the back—

 **_—what a waste—_ **   

—in some time.

“You got it backwards,” D responds lightly after a heavy silence. “I’m surprised Jay puts up with us, to be honest.”

“ _Hm. I struck a nerve. Sorry, that wasn’t intentional._ ” It makes a sound startlingly like a sigh. It has more advanced mannerisms than I would have thought so soon. “ _Could I get a camera? Seeing would be nice._ ”

“Give me a minute.”

I practically leap from my chair, picking my way over papers, scrapped notes, other miscellania I’ve left scattered in my rush to get this program up and running. I used one of the computers I never deal with anymore, one I removed some parts from. Namely, the visual tech for ideas on how to improve newer drones. The first thing I’ll need to do is move it to a fully functioning one.

A few rows away from the little gathering at the computer, I stop at a counter full of scraps. One of my oldest drones sits at the top of the pile, and this is the one I choose. This one’s camera was only a cheap webcam anyway, I was so eager to have the thing flying through the lab. I leave the husk behind, camera in my fist.

Walking back, I find the three Striders clustered around the computer, chatting with the program. Dirk and D laugh at different degrees. Hal crosses his arms over his chest, glowering at the others with his sunglasses pushed up in his hair.

“It _seems_ you think this program is better than me. Is that true?”

“Considering it was _made_ by the two of us, Roxy, and a literal scientist trope, I don’t know why you’re surprised,” Dirk says.

“ _Is that so? Well, new creations tend to outstrip their makers_ and _their predecessors._ ” The program laughs, a sound lighter than any version of Jess I’ve heard. “ _And you were created by a thirteen year old with his mental snapshot. I came from the entire Cube. I have some advantages here._ ”

“That doesn’t make you any better than I am, functionally.”

“This program holds the history of the Cube from the beginning as its personality base.” I step into the circle and get right to work. “That’s three extra years of Jess’s life, yeah, but it’s also all of the stories they’ve told. Every universe this place has touched. The memories, the In-Between spaces, the knowledge of the entire collective.”

With the camera attached to the top of the computer, I feel around the back for the port.

“It likely knows more about this place, inherently, than they do, so it’s starting out more cognitively advanced than you did. It’ll have a learning curve, where it will seem farther ahead than you, then you should settle around the same place. You know that.”

Hal seems satisfied, shifting back to face the computer when I pull back to wait for the cam to register.

“ _There you are._ ”

I grin into the camera, the other three pressing closer. Hal to one side, Dirk to another, and D behind me, I’m boxed in at the front. A thrill of anxiety moves in my chest, but I bite it back.

Then a hand lands on my shoulder, and my heart leaps into my throat.

“ _Jay._ ”

“Yes?” I squeak immediately, the reptilian panic drawing back.

“ _Nothing._ ” It remains silent for a second. “ _Just making sure you don’t go anywhere._ ”

The hand leaves me. Three bodies shift, my heart races, but I keep my eyes on the screen. It remembers everything. It knows everything—

**_—too much—_ **

—that could be witnessed by the Cube itself.

“I’m still here. Don’t worry.”

“ _Good._ ” A pop up alert blinks in the corner of the screen. “ _It would be a shame for you to spend our first meeting in your head. Open the file._ ”

Hal is faster than I am, clicking the pop-up to find a minutely detailed blueprint for a humanoid body. I glance at the half finished one I have on a table not far away, and decide not to bring it up. One look at this tells me I’m going to have to start over.

“ _I find myself with the knowledge that you wanted me to help you do your work. I can’t do that from here. I also have some requests about my programming before we go ahead with this._ ”

* * *

A familiar kid waits in the frame of my monitor, though the body holds someone I haven’t yet met inside of it. This one’s hair is shorter, a strange sight, and his eyes are _red_. Jess said we had a new arrival. Either their memory is slipping or they never actually looked at this ‘Jordan.’

“Sawyer.”

He shifts uncomfortably on the monitor, and I’m surprised to see him shake his head.

“ _No. I mean,_ yeah _, but not like you remember._ ” He averts his eyes, scratching the side of his face. “ _We—Connor and I—messed up, I think. I need to talk to you._ ”

**_He did it_ **

“ _So that’s what that was._ ”

I jump and look up to see a drone hovering not far away. Its camera adjusts while it drifts closer, ‘eyes’ on the monitor. A smaller window appears, showing fluctuations in the feedback the In-Between gives us.

One fluctuation, in particular, lights up. Less than a week ago, a spike in the energy. I likely would have written it off as an outlier if there weren’t any other oddities at the time. Which there weren’t.

“ _I thought it was nothing._ ” It activates the intercom to put Jordan out of his misery back in the hallway. “ _How long have you been in the Cube?_ ”

“ _Not long._ ”

“ _Do you know where Connor is?_ ”

He shakes his head, and j355 sighs. It brings the drone around to face me. “ _I’ve been crunching numbers, looking at records, and I learned a_ lot _about splinters_. _I was looking for a good time to discuss it with you, but maybe_ this _is a good time with one of the Sawyers here?_ ”

I nod, and it starts letting him in.

Sawyer should be coming back soon, then. The other one—

**_—Connor—_ **

—I mean. If they managed their split. If this one’s right and they ‘messed up,’ I doubt  he’ll be in a rational state of mind.

“ _He seems different. Meeker,_ ” j355 muses, buzzing off elsewhere. As it gets further away, it switches to the intercom. “ _I wonder what the other half will be like, hmm?_ ”

Oh, god.

I stand and shed my coat, leaving my desk behind. A chime sounds from the intercom, j355’s _endearing_ version of a question.

“It’s different for them than it was for us,” I say, struggling to keep my tone level. “We were already separate, we just needed our own bodies. It’s _different_ for them.”

“ _They’ll be fine. Jordan looks like an entire person. He made it sound like Connor is still an entire person._ ”

I shake my head. I don’t stop. I can't waste any time.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be out,” I call. I know it’s listening. “Days, maybe. Jordan can stay here in the meantime if he wants.”

Connor’s coming home _now,_ even if I have to drag him out of the memories myself. I need to compare them, I need to know how different they are. I don’t know if Jesse will be able to handle it if he comes back and he's a completely different person.


	12. October 2015, 29

“It’s not my fault that you’re an impulsive _child_!” I hiss without looking back at Connor. “What kind of welcome were you expecting?”

“I don’t know!”

“ _He’s going to lose it if you don’t ease up._ ”

My fingers still over the keyboard at the program’s words in my ear.

“ _The patterns of behavior I have for him are still in development, but he has met eight of his forty nine probable behaviors logged preceding loss of control or complete shut down. The maximum number of these behaviors I’ve seen him exhibit before succumbing to these effects is twelve._ ”

Which means he’s broken down at least once since his split. I wish I’d gotten a chance to talk to Jordan. If I complain about that out loud, I won’t hear the end of it from j355, though.

 _Connor_ continues speaking, and I turn back to watch him. He paces, back and forth, chewing his cheek and staring blankly at the floor. Those are three stress signs, I think, but I don’t know what the others could be. I lift my phone and send a message to the program.

**I’ve looked into the cathartic effects of letting go of emotional control. Perhaps it would be best to let that happen.**

“ _No_.”

It doesn’t say anything else on the matter, so try to listen more sympathetically.

“... you know? I’m still trying to get used to being half of who I was, so that’s weird enough, but the rest of it is new, too. Everyone who used to hate me hates me _more_ , but this time it _hurts_ because Jess is one of them.”

He pauses in his pacing, back to me. His arms lock around his chest, and now I can see his shoulders trembling.

I sigh.

“They don’t hate you.”

He doesn’t move, but I continue anyway.

“You gave them two years to realize that you were manipulative, even if you had the best intentions.” I push against the desk to roll my chair and try seeing around him. “But you know what they said when they chewed me out about not telling them you were back?”

He grunts. Typical.

“They said a lot of shit about us both being idiots. But in the end, they were mad because they spent two years _waiting_ for you.”

“I should have come back sooner, is that what you’re saying?” he retorts, turning back to me. Red rings his eyes, and I wonder if that’s another thing I missed. “That this is my own problem after all?”

“No, listen, I’m trying to be nice.”

He straightens up, brows raised and suddenly attentive. I can be nice, though that’s apparently news to him. I scowl but continue my train of thought.

“You need to give them time. They gave you two years, you sure as hell owe them the grace to deal with them being mad at you for a few days. Weeks. However long they’re actually capable of holding a grudge.”

He smiles, for once.

“That’s almost sweet, coming from you.”

“I’m being nice to _them_. Not you.” I cross my arms and lounge back in my chair. “They’re the reason we’re all here. No matter how infuriating they can be, they’re family.”

His weak smile grows weaker, and soon disappears. I stand and let my chair roll back to the desk. He doesn’t attempt to argue or defend himself. I regard him a moment longer.

“Give them time. Let them recover. And if you ever do anything like that again, do something you know full well will ruin them, don’t expect me to let you hide here.” He opens his mouth to speak, but I cut across him. “We’ll talk about your lessons tomorrow. Just—”

He starts to say something, but it dies when I lift a hand.

“Just go. I can’t look at you right now.”

He listens, and I’m left with nothing but a chastising voice in my ear. “ _He’s much more likely to make impulsive decisions when he’s agitated, as are you. You aren’t helping anyone by acting like this._ ”

“I’ve never pretended that I’m capable of helping them.”

“I dunno, I think you’re doin’ a pretty good job.” I jerk my head up to see D pushing open the door Connor just left through. “Not all heroes wear capes, my dude.”

“What’s the point in even locking the doors if you’re going to let everyone in without checking with me first?” I call, glaring at the security camera above the door. “You’ll see _impulsive_ when I cut you off from the security system!”

“What. You didn’t let me in?” He vaults onto a table near the door and rests his chin on steepled fingers once he’s settled. “‘S too bad. Here I am, thinkin’ you actually wanted me here. Damn.”

“‘ _You are always welcome here, D.’_ ” The program plays a recording of my own voice from last week over the intercom. “ _Should I not have taken that as permission to allow him in whenever he wants to visit?_ ”

My face heats up, and I wave my arms angrily at the camera while D laughs. That light giggle sounds over the speaker, then the line goes dead. It might not be talking to us, but I’m certain that it’s still detailing everything.

“Don’t forget, you need me to build your body!”

It doesn’t answer.

“Sounds like you’re goin’ stir crazy,” D cuts in, and he’s sitting with his legs hanging off the edge of the table when I look back at him. “Wanna go somewhere?”

Jesus, it’s been months since I left this fluorescent prison. But, “Did you walk all the way over here to ask me to ‘go somewhere’?”

He shrugs, physically turning his head to look away. “I actually _walked all the way over here_ to ask if you wanted to go out to The Lounge for drinks, but yeah.”

I almost break at how overdone his mimicry is, but I _do_ manage to keep a straight face. “I have a phone, you know.”

He laughs, though he fidgets on his perch.

A crackle sounds in my ear, before the gentle whisper of the program decides to weigh in. “ _I knew it_.”

I tilt my head and glance at the camera.

“ _Of all the things I could have predicted doing for you, spelling out that you’re being asked on a date did not make my list._ ”

Oh.

_Oh._

“ _Have fun._ ” The line goes dead again.

“So, what d’ya say?” I jump, turning my attention back to D.

“I—” I stop myself before I can _say_ much of anything. I hook the earpiece to pull it out before I continue, buying myself a moment of time. “I have to ask you something, first, because J Three-five-five can’t mind its own business.”

“Oh?” His brow quirks, and some of my nerves ebb. “Shoot.”

I hesitate a beat, turning the earpiece over in my hands, then, “Going to The Lounge. As in, um, a date?”

“Yes,” he says after a beat of silence.

Damn it.

“Oh.” I look down at the device in my hands, not really sure what to say to that. ‘That’s not a good idea’ is close to the top of the list.

This course of events never even crossed my mind.

**_What else have I missed?_ **

“But, like, if you’re not feelin’ that, it doesn’t need to be.” I look back up to see him adjusting his sunglasses with a wry smile. “I’ve never seen you leave this place, and it’d be cool to hang out in the outside world. Nothin’ more than two pals hangin’ out in the local bar. Tavern. Whatever the fuck they call it.”

He shifts on the table and I realize: he’s _nervous_. This is him being _nervous_ , how the hell is that fair? He fidgets and his accent gets thicker, what have I been doing with my nerves this whole time?

“Unless you wanted it to be more than that, I mean. You know. Just sayin’, to keep the options open, ’s up to you. If you even wanna go. Damn, do you even drink? I probably should’a asked that first, huh?”

He’s so much more like the younger versions of him than he thinks he is.

“We could always just go back to the loft. We’ve got a ton of movies, games, whatever. I think the kids had shit they wanted to show you anyway—”

“D.”

“Mhm?” He pauses, hand halfway through raking through his hair.

“I do drink. I _do_ want to go—not on a date, but I need to get out of here before I lose my mind.” I stop for a heartbeat at his grin, then continue with a smile of my own. “And if the boys have been wanting to get ahold of me, we should definitely stop by—the loft, you called it? I can’t say no to them, you know that.”  

He slides off the table and we walk to the door together.

He moves to open it, but I wave his hand away. “Hang on. I know a shortcut.”

I pull a keyring from my pocket and fumble with it until I separate a dark iron key from the rest. The handle on the door morphs into an old doorknob and I fit the key into its lock.

“I thought only Jess had keys like that,” D notes.

Tugging the door open, I flash him a smile and jam the keys back into my pocket. “There are a lot of keys floating around the Cube these days.”

* * *

“ _I miss you, you know._ ”

I snort, downing another shot. The program still hums through my earpiece, but I don’t answer. I haven’t been in the lab in days and I think I finally figured out why.

Out here, the itching in my fingers is small enough to ignore now that the _looks_ have stopped. I don’t know who it was, but it sounds like _someone_ has been spreading word of the few good things I’m doing. So the looks stopped. And the urge to tinker in the back rooms has waned.

It _will_ come back. It always does.

“Break that glass and you owe me a steady line of O-neg for six months.”

My left hand releases like a claw, letting the shotglass tumble into the Vampire’s waiting hand. They gesture at me with it, their feigned anger betrayed by the grin on their face.

“Not that I need it with how packed this place is, but you know. I’m sure you could get me some high quality blood.”

They toss the glass into the air, and it vanishes. I guess that’s me getting cut off for the night. I’m not even drunk, but that’s fine. I’ll stop by the loft before I head home.

“You drink from your customers?” I turn to face the tables spanning The Lounge. “And everyone accuses me of bending ethics.”

“Everything I do with my _customers_ is completely consensual, thanks much,” they quip. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Whatever you—”

I stop.

**_What is he doing here?_ **

A kid a little older than Jess—he would be, what? Eighteen now?—piles plates and cups into a bin a few tables away. He keeps his head down, shoulders hunched. The last time I saw him…     

**_He’s alive_ **

“What? What’s up?”

“I don’t—” know what I could possibly say about this. I shake my head. “Either I’m a lot drunker than I think I am, or that’s Dominic bussing your tables.”

They make an inquiring sound, then groan. “Yeah. J-Prime asked me to give him something to do? Lame, if you ask me, but I don’t need to get on their bad side.”

They’re _mad_. Dominic is _right there_ , and The Vampire’s _mad_ about it.

“Dominic.”

He freezes in place just a table away and jerks up to look at me, eyes wide, wary. I don’t know if he would recognize me now, god, he was _thirteen_ and it’s been more than five years since he would have last seen me. Five years and he’s _alive_.

I didn’t even have a name five years ago.

He doesn’t say anything, but the bin of dishes drops back down onto the empty table. Jess scoffs behind me and leaps over the counter separating them from the tables.

“Go on, take a break,” they say, waving a hand at him as they pass. “Better than getting in a fight while you’re working.”

I stare after them, the energy to glare at them not coming even though the desire is there. They aim a finger gun over their shoulder before lifting the bin and starting rounds themself.

Dominic approaches the counter, and I get it. He’s Tchaikovsky’s son. No one else got to see him grow up, no one knows anything other than him following his father everywhere. He doesn’t look directly at me, climbing onto the stool beside me. He waits, and it takes me a minute to realize for what.

Oh, _Dominic._

“I didn’t know you were here,” I blurt, if only to dispel that _expectancy_ of anger. “I would have found you earlier.”

He flicks a glance at me, but his gaze leaves me almost immediately. “I keep my head down.”

I manage to bite my tongue for all of five seconds. “How did you get away? When?”

He looks back up, though he doesn’t meet my gaze, eyes wide. Why is he so _surprised_?

“It’s been months. My dad finally got shut down, you didn’t hear about that?” The way he spits those words—‘my dad’—is a relief.

“I—”

 **_—thought you were_ ** **dead** **_—_ **

“—don’t get out much.”

I hate the following silence. He scratches the back of his neck, and I think of how different he looks. Both from his father and from the last time I saw him. He was just a kid when I ran away from the compound. He’s _still_ just a kid, and he doesn’t deserve any of this crap. This protective urge in the back of my head surprises me. The anger at the way he seems to be waiting for reprimand. He’s had to be there for the past five years, and now that he’s gotten away—what?  Everyone hates him? Or maybe it’s just The Vampire? Or…

Dominic clears his throat.

“Jess mentioned ‘the scientist’ when we were in Furnace. Was that—I mean, is that you?”

“You were in _Furnace?_ ” I can’t keep the edge out of my voice, and he flinches. I make a point to dial that back. “That’s—yes. If we’re going with the ridiculous epithets, I’m The Scientist.”

“You’re Jay, then. They talk about you a lot.” His brows furrow and he hunches down. “Or, they did. Before Connor came back.”

That piece of garbage.

“How are you adjusting?” I ask, instead of abusing Jess where their friends can hear me.

He makes a vague shrugging gesture. “It’s safer here. That’s weird.”

It’s so _fucked_ that this place could be called safer than anywhere. But he’s right.

“I’m still not used to not being scared,” I answer lightly. “The others seem to have found something that works for them, though. Maybe one of them can help you.”

He laughs out loud.

“You’re the only person here whose first instinct wasn’t 'get out of my sight.'”

I bristle at that. This isn’t going to continue, whatever _this_ is.

“That’s not your fault. Give it—”

The door opens behind us, and I jerk around to face the oozing energy. Jess gently closes them before making a beeline for a table near the back. I glance at Dominic, finding him watching them too. His brows furrow, and his mouth presses into a thin line—anxious in comparison to the growing anger I harbor. I don't need to feel it to know he's hurting.

Fuck this.

“I’ll be back,” I mutter.

Before he can answer, I slide off my stool and start for the table Jess has their eyes on—or, the table they _had_ their eyes on before Jezebeth forced them to stop. Even better, I’ll be able to wait for them. I pass The Vampire on the way, but all I get out of their words are the vague shape of a question.

Several members of The Collective wait at the table, chattering among themselves. Quell and Jocelyn flirt in their own bubble, but Haz, Aster, and Jarie all look up expectantly when I jerk a chair out of place and drop into it. They only wait a few seconds before losing interest and returning to their idle discussion.

I shouldn’t be surprised about where the gossip flows today.

“I don’t get why everyone’s so upset about it, though.” Haz, The Dreamwalker, taps its fingers on the polished surface of the table, talking right through the others’ attempts to argue. “Hey, no, listen. No one’s obligated to stay in the Cube. Leave the guy alone.”

I _am_ surprised that Connor has someone on his side already.

“I don’t give a _shit_ about him leaving,” Jarie snaps, domineering as always. “Did you hear his whole party line about giving us room to grow? We’re not idiots, we all _saw_ Jor—”

Their voice cuts out at a sharp look from Aster. Jarie’s hand jumps to their throat, confirming The Fae’s theft of their voice, though Aster now grins at a new arrival. All signs that they were discussing anything heavier than the weather disappears, smiles and lazy greetings from all three as Jess drops into the only seat left.

Jocelyn and Quell don’t even look up.

“I didn’t expect to see you out here,” Jess notes, their voice unusually warm and comfortable. “Everything okay?”

I barely manage to suppress the automatic nod. I likely would have failed if my scrambler and Haz’s presence weren’t muffling the ease I don’t need to feel to know they’re radiating. I wonder if they know just how strong they’re getting. There’s no point hiding behind pleasantries at this point. If they don’t know how much they’ve fucked up this time, they’d better be ready to find out.

“Why am I just finding out about Dominic now?” I ask, pleased at how well I mirror their calm demeanor despite how _pissed_ I am.

Their smile disappears, and theirs isn’t the only one.

“I thought you knew,” they answer, voice still so level it hurts. “He’s been here for a while.”

“So I heard.” I purse my lips and point my gaze over my shoulder to find Dominic watching us from the bar, everything about him pulled close. Trying to be smaller than he is. “Is there a reason he thinks everyone in the Cube wants him gone?”

“Uh.” Jarie knocks against the table. I should have known better than to think they would keep their nose out of it. “Because we do? He’s Tchaikovsky’s son. He’s—”

“ _Not_ Tchaikovsky.” I bite back an unsavory way to punctuate that, turning back to Jess. “You dropped him when Connor came back. Why?”

The answer is obvious. They’d abandon any of us for him. _Any_ of us. I want to hear them say it. I want them to _apologize_ to Dominic. The question hangs in the air, and this time no one jumps on the chance to answer it for them.

Watching them this closely, their stillness isn’t absolute. Their jaw shifts, teeth tapping together as the seconds tick past. They don’t look at me, eyes focused on the table instead. Finally, they answer, so quiet I almost miss it.

“His eyes,” they murmur. “I can’t look at his eyes.”

I freeze. That’s not what I expected, but it makes so much _sense._

He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t keep his eyes on me for more than a few seconds at a time. I wonder how many people started with intentions to be kind and recoiled at the eyes I know are exact copies of his father’s.

 _I_ recoiled at them back in the compound, didn’t I?

I push out of my chair. I need to get out of here. I’ll find a way to fix this later, but I can’t stay here with Jess looking so ashamed and the others watching me like a pariah.

**_Again._ **

“I’ve said that about you a few times. I still talk to you,” I say before turning back for the counter.

I’ll give Dominic a key and leave. I have to get back to the lab. The itch is back, much sooner than I expected.


	13. December 2015, 29

I never know how to explain exactly who Jesse is to me. To anyone in the Cube. Or who they are in any sense, sometimes. They’re here, they _are_ what they are for better or for worse.  But I don’t know what they want. I don’t know where they’re going. I don’t know how far they’re willing to go. _I don’t know who they are_.

That likely says more about them than anything, since we’re all a part of them. But I’ve always found that thinking about them makes traversing the memories and the In-Between safer. That gives me plenty of time to think about it and no reason to make myself stop.

They forgave Connor—at the very least, he’s following them around like a puppy again—far sooner than I would have. I’m working hard to make sure they don’t find out about Jordan.

Connor and Jordan were one of the only people to visit me before they split. No matter how pissed I might be, I’ll protect their secrets. That, and I think Connor deserves to have to tell them that himself. They could help in my bid to find him, but I’m not taking that particular punishment away from our remaining Sawyer.

We’re all doing our best to make sure that Jesse’s alright.

 _“You’re getting close to the signal.”_ J355’s cheerful certainty remains as unnerving as ever. _“Can you hear anything?”_

“No.”

The In-Between is silent. The pure darkness only shimmers with my dulled footsteps, a mirage among dreams. The interference they heard has to be around here somewhere if their mapping is functioning right.

For all I know, it might not be.

But they _did_ record the sound, and I _did_ hear it. There shouldn’t be anything out here if no one’s in the In-Between, so the interference likely means someone got stuck out here without a way to contact the Cube. I never wanted to do search and rescue, but with Jordan missing…

That, and j355 insisted that there’s something strange about this. I’ve never been able to say no to a good mystery.

A ripple of color streaks the fabric of the In-Between, the only warning I get.

I clap my hands over my ears the second the screech hits me. It doesn’t take the tearing agony of the sound away, doesn’t keep the rainbow from painting the world around me. It only keeps me on my feet, my eyes open.

So I see the flashing images.

Familiar but meaningless pictographs flicker in black and white. Space warps around them to turn the oily color in the air into a muddy dome of _sound_. Eyes on them, I finally sink to my knees. A grinning face flashes, for just an instant, before everything disappears.

I stare into the darkness again. The negatives of the colors swim, that smile seeming to mock me now that it’s gone.

What. The hell.

My hand shakes more than I’d ever like to admit when I reach up to touch my com.

“I think I heard it that time.”

_“Wonderful. Come back so we can analyze it together.”_

* * *

J355 doesn’t wait for me to close the door before pulling at the device strapped to my back. They’ve been running in circles about the sounds, curious about how the In-Between has been faring since I captured it in their current mind. They complain about how unreliable their surveillance is out there on the daily.

“We need to check your vitals,” they say. They finally manage to get me out of the harness, but they don’t stop talking when they turn to walk away. “The readings cut out during the encounter and they haven’t come on.”

“I’m fine.” I follow them. The path to the main lab winds, curved to avoid the cavernous rooms I hide my real projects in. “I’ll prove that _after_ we review those visuals.”

They pause, presumably to let me catch up, and we continue on together.

“Did you see something?” they ask, the cameras where their eyes should be swiveling to point at me. “Someone?”

I turn my gaze ahead and double my speed.

“I don’t know what I saw. I was busy making sure I recorded it.” I tug the glasses from my face to make my point and pass them over. “I want to know what’s out there before someone else catches wind of it.”

J355 laughs, the sound almost tinny. “There’s at least three people that likely knew about this before it ever tripped our sensors.”

“Jesse and Haz don’t count,” I say, voice flat. “And if Gray knows, I doubt she cares.”

“The third one was the _other_ Jess, but okay.” They laugh again, and I wonder if they do that for me or because they’re actually amused. “Sometimes I think they hear things before The Original does, don’t you?”

I clench my jaw and push the door to the main room open.

“The only time Jesse doesn’t know about something is when they don’t want to know,” I mutter. “I’ve stopped keeping track of how much of my life is a retroactive decision on their part.”

They whir, and I know the buffering sound is purely for my benefit.

“I’ll just sift through this.” They split off without looking at me. “Someone’s here to see you.”

I watch them go, gaze trained on the door they slip through even after it closes. They’ve been particularly emotional lately. Touchy. They show signs of bugs none of the Striders saw coming, and when I asked them, they set blame on the snapshot I took of the Cube. Too broad, too much to be contained or controlled by coding. J355 predicts that they’ll find a balance eventually, I just hope that comes before they tear themself apart.

I perk up at the controlled energy approaching from the lab’s main doors. I don’t know what Jesse’s here about, but I can tell they’re excited about whatever it is.

I weave through the tables (newly organized, j355 has been playing Roomba), to meet them at the door. And, of course, to snatch one of my scramblers from a dispenser right next to the door. I’d rather not talk to them without at least one of these on my person.

I barely manage to back out of the way when the door swings open.

“—can find him, it’s them.” They face away from me, blocking the shadow of a figure they brought with them. “The Bot said they should be—oh!”

They scan the room until they catch sight of me and wave. I return the gesture, though much less enthusiastically, and shove the scrambler into my pocket. Then they step out of the way, and I’m glad I don’t have anything to drop in my hands.

Now, this is hardly the first time I’ve had a skeleton in my lab. It’s not even the first time I’ve had a _living_ skeleton here. This one, however, carries the same aura of unseen ability as Jesse. All wrapped in a hoodie and sweatpants, but still too much for me to be comfortable with.

“Jay, this is Sans.” Jesse gestures to the both of us in turn. “I’ll tell you all about the new universe later. For now, he’s looking for someone.”

New universe. A new file to fill. New _people_. If they would bring him to me, they must trust him. I’ll have to do my best to do the same.

Even so, I frown at Jesse. “I’ll never accuse you of having good timing.”

They shrug but don’t even try to defend themself. They look to Sans and wave vaguely at me again before wandering further into the lab. I watch them go with narrowed eyes, though I know they wouldn’t intrude without a reason.

“So.”

I look back to Sans and manage not to jump out of my skin because he’s closer than he was. He watches Jesse, too, though, so I don’t know if he would have noticed if I had been unable to control myself.

“I’m not into search and rescue,” I say, and he finally turns to me. “Why do they think I can find who you’re looking for?”

Dear lord, he’s not a skeleton. He’s just. Shaped like that. But that’s definitely some kind of skin pulling back when he smiles. It’s strained, a flash of blue touching his left eye, but still a smile.

“You know about the fabric of reality, right?” he asks. “They said that’s what you do—study it, fix it, whatever.”

I stare at him and let my fingers dig into my palm. Whoever he's looking for is  _really_ lost.

“Yes,” I say eventually. “Reality is relative here, and I’m sure it’s different than where you’re from.”

He nods.

“I’m counting on it.”

I lift a hand to prompt him into following me when I turn, but the slamming of a door makes me jump.

God _damn_ it.

“Jay!” J355 doesn’t stop to close the door behind them (even though it leads to one of the back rooms), stomping toward me with their nose buried in a stack of papers. “This is so stupid, but it’s Wingdings.”

I try to process that, but they stop in front of me to shove the papers in my hands before I can.

It’s a frame-by-frame analysis of the recording of the In-Between excursion. The timestamp on this one says it’s a little over two hours in, those strange pictures taking up the image.

Next to it, j355 has notes scribbled, the pictographs transferred with letters ascribed to each. The android hands me another, folded, sheet of paper. This one is more legible.

**HELLO?  
** **OH  
** **YOU CAN SEE ME  
** **WHERE AM I?**

“That’s—” Sans snatches the top sheet of the analysis from my hand and looks it over. “It’s him. Gaster.”

I immediately look up to find Jesse. They watch us from across the room, and I can see from here that they’re smiling.

Hm. Timing.

* * *

“Oh, shut up.”

“✋︎⧫︎ ✋︎⬧︎ ⧫︎❒︎◆︎♏︎”

I glance at the translator and shake my head.

_IT IS TRUE._

“Bullshit.” I tap the table, then get back to typing. “You might have been trapped in your universe, but—”

_EVEN THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE._

“Impossible isn’t a thing in the Cube. This place is the only reason Sans could even remember you,” I promise. “Besides, you don’t want me to give up. You think anyone else would sit here and let you tell them they’re wrong?”

_WHY DO YOU CARE SO MUCH?_

I pause and turn back to the radio. Its pair sits in the In-Between, near where we first ran into Gaster, listening to the changes in the area’s signal. The radio crackles and spits, even in his silence.

“I had a friend hiding in the memories for a long time.” I wait a second to see if he’ll interrupt. “Part of him is still out there. You’re woven into the In-Between like a thread, and I know that can’t be easy.”

_WHO TOLD YOU WHO I AM? DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE?_

I smile.

“If Jesse’s information is accurate, I do. You tried to save your people, and what happened to you wouldn’t have been dangerous or irreversible if it had happened here.” I turn back to my computer to continue my back and forth with Hal. “And it was Sans.”

_AND WHAT DO YOU EXPECT TO HAPPEN IF YOU SUCCEED?_

“That’s none of my business.” My computer pings and I open the new file. “I’ll ask when I get the chance. You’ll likely join the rest of the Underground’s population in your universe.”

The sounds from the radio snap and pop to make the translation unclear, but I have a feeling about this particular complaint. I don’t know if he’ll believe me about this, but—

“They aren’t trapped anymore.” I push myself up. I have real work to do while I run the projections for Hal’s newest attempt at a fix for j355. While the projections for my own attempts at freeing Gaster run. “Jesse made sure of that. When you get back, you’ll be able to see the sun again.”

His words are quiet, and I’m almost surprised when the response appears on my screen.

_THAT IS A WONDERFUL DREAM, THOUGH IT IS A DREAM ALL THE SAME._

I look back at the radio with a hand on the doorknob. I know he can’t see me, but sometimes is feels like it. I need to ask how intune he is with the Cube itself, whether he’s aware of happenings outside of his sphere of reference. Though, if the rest of the Cube _is_ feeding into him, he might not even be aware of it.

Instead, I sigh.

“It might be a dream, but that doesn’t make it any less real.” I tug the door open and step through. “I have to go. Try to stay positive.”

I wonder if he knows just how much of a dream this really is.

* * *

“He can’t just be _gone_ ,” I say again. Sans has been shuffling through my papers since he arrived, searching for traces of Gaster. “I got him out, you confirmed he met with you.”

“He did!”

I’ve never seen Sans so worked up. The flash of blue I caught when I first met him has exploded into a haze of smoke drifting from his left eye in spades. I’m not certain if he’s angry with me or simply worried, but the tension in the air has me more than ready to flee.

“You told Jesse?” I ask, my voice noticeably smaller. “They have people looking, right?”

He looks up to me, the light in his eye extinguishing. He drops the records back on the table and takes a step back with his hands lifted in surrender. In submission?

“Yeah.” He turns away, toward the door, but I’m not sure if that’s what he’s really seeing. “Yeah. Sorry, I just kinda barged in here, didn’t I?”

I frown, but he shakes his head before I can say anything.

“I’ll go.” He starts for the door and he doesn’t look back. Before he gets it open, I catch sight of the light rising from his eye once again. “Catch ‘ya later.”

And I’m alone. So I can check the phone that’s been sending pings to my earpiece since Sans arrived. Six missed calls and a single text from Jesse. I don’t open it, eyes locked on the text notification.

_I know exactly where Gaster is. Call me back NOW._

Of course they know. They’ll run an automatic search on someone that _Sans Undertale_ tells them to, but they won’t do it to find the people we should be protecting ourselves from. Alright. Whatever. I shut the phone completely off and turn to stalk for the only door in this room that even the keys to the lab won’t open. I lift my hand and the key Kane gave me materializes in my grip.

Allegiance is a fickle thing.

The door opens without me even needing to use the key as it’s made to be used, and vanishes behind me the instant I pass through. It’s a few more passageways, rooms, doors, before I find a figure hunched over one of my older research journals.

“I know you want to know what I’ve learned about this place,” I say. The figure doesn’t even jump, but he does look up. “But you might not be able to stay here. They’re already looking for you.”

The man stands, the broken smile he aimed at me when I first dragged him out of that machine nowhere to be seen.

“That certainly is a problem.” The faint outlines of the strange symbols still float lazily around him when he speaks, but I no longer need a translator to understand him. “Where would you have me go?”

I shake my head and squeeze the phone in my pocket.

“I’ll make some calls, see how many favors I have to cash in.” I let myself drop a little bit of the facade of calm I’m holding when he turns back to the book. “I’m just letting you know. You might not be able to delay facing them much longer.”

He nods, distracted.

“Very well. Promise me something.”

I hesitate. A promise is what got me in this mess in the first place.

“I will if I can,” I say eventually.

Gaster closes the journal and rises to his feet to face me fully. That smile is back to scatter my nerves once again. Why are these skeleton monsters so _weird?_

“I have decided to admit to all of my own research when I return.” Oh no, I know where this is— “I hope to see you do the same, one day.”

I stare at him, and that warm-but-shattered smile doesn’t waver for an instant. He’s been reading my notes, knows what I’ve been doing, and he still thinks I should go public with it all? Even if Jesse is being tolerant, I know that tempers run hot far too easily here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to turn my personal journals over to the rest of The Collective.

I smile.

“Of course.”


	14. January 2016, 29

I should have seen this coming.

I tried to work up to the worst of my projects. To show j355 what I’ve been doing in bits and pieces before asking them to help in the furthest reaches of the lab’s cavernous rooms. Everything was going well, but they grew quieter with every new subject we worked with. I didn’t realize that Jesse had purposefully cut these rooms off from their field of vision when they gave me this space. I had no way to know that j355 wasn’t aware of what I’ve been doing back here, just that they had never physically been in the back and had respected my request for them not to root out my locked files.

I thought they knew, this whole time. Still, I should have seen it coming.

“No.”

J355 flits around the front lab with a bag. I stand in the middle, only moving to keep them in my line of sight. They don’t look at me while they gather whatever they want. Hell, they could probably take my files with the intention of revealing what I’m doing and I wouldn’t stop them.

They don’t, though.

I don’t trust myself to speak. I still hold a scalpel in my hand, the door to the back still hangs wide open. Anyone could come in and there’d be nothing I could do to stop them from seeing everything.

“No,” they repeat. They dump an entire drawer of pens, erasers, and other miscellanea into their bag. “I understand why you don’t want to be alone here, now more than ever, but I can’t. This isn’t what I signed up for.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmur.

They finally swing around to glare at me.

“God damn it, _I’m_ not the one you should be apologizing to!” They gesture wildly at the door to the back. “I don’t care what good you’re doing, the means don’t justify the ends this time.”

I clench my jaw, but I don’t say anything.

They sling the backpack over their shoulder. They scowl at the floor, but make no move to leave.

“I’m—” They tilt their head back slightly, their cameras turning toward the ceiling. I recognize it, a memetic gesture likely pulled from Jesse themself to mask their crying. Ironic in serving to tell me that’s what they would be doing if they could. “Yeah, I’m gonna go stay with Davesprite. I already messaged him.”

“Okay.”

**_Not okay_ **

My voice cracks and the mixture of frustration and panic pulsing in my chest almost does me in. Panic at the trained memory that showing fear or hurt leads to the worst outcomes, frustration that I can’t control that response.

They stare at me, and it takes me some time to recognize pity in their gaze.

“You have to tell someone eventually. _Anyone_.”

I look away.

“There’s never a right time to tell the truth,” they go on. “But please tell me you recognize that you’re _lying_ to everyone you care about.”

“No one wants to know this.”

**_No one needs to know_ **

“If you stop now—”

“I can’t stop!” I snap. I turn a sharp glare on them. “This is what I was created for, in the most literal sense. You can walk away, part of me is _happy_ you are, but I don’t have that luxury.”

“You say that as if you didn’t program me specifically to help you do it,” they hiss.

I flinch, and another panic response claws at my throat.

“I didn’t want—” I stop when they look away, toward the door. I lower my gaze and start again. “You know we never gave you a prime directive.”

“Yeah, well.” They shake their head a little with a bitter laugh. I’ve never seen bitterness on them, and it turns my stomach. “Maybe it would have been better for both of us if you had.”

They leave, and there’s nothing I can say to stop them.

Well.

If I had agreed to tell someone, they might have stayed. If I had admitted this was a lie of omission. If I had promised to at least try to phase these tests out. There are a million things I could have said to keep them here, but what’s the point?

“ _Fuck!_ ”

I turn and throw the scalpel toward the door leading to the back. It slams shut and disappears. Sparks fly throughout the lab, and the sheer force of the emotional feedback voids my lungs. The scramblers are offline.

I gasp for air, but I know what this is. What I need isn’t oxygen, it’s to calm

**_The fuck_ **

Down.

But that knowledge doesn’t stop the hot tears from forcing their way up, which only tears my nerves apart more. Crying, huh? That’s just asking to be

**_Noticed found caught_ **

And I can’t afford this. Everything bubbles up at once, all the progress I made. Did I ever actually take the steps forward I thought I did, or is it always just the steps back?

I’m starting to get dizzy—hyperventilating does that—when a hand lands on my shoulder and I scream. It only send another icepick of panic through my diaphragm, though it vanishes immediately, and I don’t even remember where I am anymore. I’m going to

**_Really regret_ **

Losing my composure.

A flinch might earn a strike, a gasp of pain a worse night, but crying? Becoming a heaving mess? The retribution for this won’t be quick, I won’t be able to grit my teeth and bear it, by the time Tchaikovsky’s through with me I’ll be lucky if I can walk for days.

Maybe it would be more merciful if he makes a mistake and manages to kill me.

I snort a hysterical laugh at the thought, and that snaps me out of the worst of it. Blubbering laughter mixes with the tears, which only makes me laugh harder. I made an artificial consciousness, hoped it would help me, and even it turned out to find my work too reprehensible to continue. And instead of listening like a sensible person, I let, arguably, the best thing I’ve ever created leave me. What’s the saying?

If you love something, let it go?

The heavy weight of concern flowing through the air from behind me drags me further out of my head. Right, there was someone here before, wasn’t there? Was that real, or was it just another part of the panic attack?

“—don’t know, they were freaking out when I got here and I just _forgot_ —”

“You can’t take it back now. Physical contact helps for most people, you panicked. Do you know if they were drinking?”

I take a shuddering breath and finally manage to get myself silent. Me being quiet is a good thing. With the voices, the rest of my senses begin their return.

“Fuck, I don’t know. Should we call Jesse? They’re good with this kind of thing.”

At some point, I ended up on the floor, curled into a tight ball. My subconscious made the regrettable choice of laying on my left side, so the metal of my prosthetic pinches at my shoulder. If the throbbing on that side of my head is any indication, though, I may have actually fallen.

“Jay’s scramblers are down, they’d just make it worse.”

The rest of my body wants to find my bed, maybe take a shower, but my fingers twitch with the need to work. I have a feeling neither of the guys behind me are gonna give them what they want, though, so maybe I’ll actually get some sleep tonight. Maybe I can look at this like a normal person for once.

“Yeah, they’re kinda—” D clicks his tongue and I can imagine him rocking his hand in a noncommittal gesture. It almost convinces my leaden muscles to smile. “What, then? We can’t just leave them here—alone!”

One of the Dirks, or—no, it’s probably Hal—sighs. “Honestly, now that they’re calming down, you should just stay with them. If they’d known it was you before, you might have been able to head this off.”

“Shit, _fuck_ , I can’t believe I just _forgot_ ,” D hisses.

“You saw someone important to you having some kind of breakdown. Re: Empathy response.”

D mutters something I don’t catch, Hal says nothing. Silence falls, the pinching of my arm and the oppressive worry the only things keeping me conscious. I want to say something, to let them know I’m perfectly fine now, but I don’t know if I can even open my eyes.

“And where the _hell_ is j355?”

Ah.

“I’m not sure. They aren’t connected to the system anymore, but—”

“Gone,” I mutter.

“Holy shit, Jay.”

The weight of concern mixes with the warmth of relief when one of them drops down at my side. I’m almost certain it’s D, but I probably shouldn’t trust my head right now.

“Gone where?” Hal asks, his distance a confirmation of D’s comfortable presence being the closer one. “Did they shut down? That shouldn’t—”

“Nn.” I manage a slight shake of my head. “Left. It’s probably for the best.”

“ _Where?_ ” Hal presses, and I finally crack an eye open.

D sits with his legs crossed and his hands clasped in his lap. I open my eye a little wider when I see he took his sunglasses off. Interesting. Hal stands a little further away. Panic shoots from him in controlled bursts, absolutely not helping with my nerves or my headache. I close my eyes with a grunt.

“With Davesprite.” I curl until my head presses against D’s knee. The physical contact sucks in the warmth of his relief like a hot pack. “Now calm down or leave. Your brain is hurting my brain.”

The turnaround that statement gives Hal is enough to wake me all the way up. His curiosity and interest demolishes the itch in my hands to work. I don’t move, still, but I’m much more willing to listen to him speak.

“You can feel our emotions? I thought that only worked with the Collective.”

I frown.

“Who told you that?”

“Jezebeth.” Hal’s voice sounds closer now. I think he’s sat down. “Is it not true?”

I wrinkle my nose and finally push up from the ground. Vertigo spins my head and forces me to pause, but I manage to contort myself into a sitting position. This is nice, sitting with crossed legs under my table across from two Striders. I keep one knee pressed against D’s to ground myself on the still raw emotions there and the interest he’s now exuding, too.

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Of course it is,” D says in a deadpan.

“Some of it has to do with sheer ability,” I explain. “Jesse, for example, can get pretty much anyone’s emotions and project onto anyone. That’s just how they are.”

“So, you have to have a high level of ability?” Hal theorizes.

I shake my head.

“It’s more about connections. The Collective is just better tuned into each other because we’re literally part of each other, and we’re all more _inclined_ to it because we came from Jesse, you know?”

Both of them nod.

“But anyone in the Cube can theoretically catch emotions from each other as long as they get the basic concept of the Cube’s true nature. I bet, if you tried, you both could.” Hal’s words from before strike me, about D’s empathy responses. And they didn’t know j355 had left, which means no one would have told them to check on me. “Actually—”

I shift to focus on D.

“Why did you come visit me today?” I ask. “What went through your mind when you made that decision?”

He hesitates. Even Hal watches him curiously.

“I was just hanging out in the loft. Watching a movie, you know?” He shrugs. “But I got hella restless and figured I should head over here. It just felt right.”

I nod while awe radiates from Hal.

“Same here, I was—” He rocks back and shoves his glasses into his hair. “I was just sitting around with Roxy and Jaqi. Didn’t even get the message to come until I was almost here.”

I give my most emphatic ‘there you go’ gesture.

“Incredible,” he murmurs. He looks back to me, and I have a hard time identifying the mix of emotions he's flying through. “So, you can feel more from people you care about?”

It’s my turn to pause.

“It’s most effective when there’s a mutual bond,” I say slowly. “The Collective’s mutual connection is Jesse. It sounds like, and it’s a big _if_ to say that you could gain complete control over this, but you should be able to catch things from your whole family.”

A sly smile spreads across D’s face, and I incline my head warily. What now?

“You totally just lumped yourself in with the Strider heap.”

Hal stifles a laugh. I tilt my head and gaze at D until his smile grows uncertain. Then I reach out with my own thoughts and brush over both of their consciousnesses with tired affection. They straighten up in sync, and I huff a laugh.

“I think I crossed that bridge already, D ‘Takes-in-Ever-Sad-Stray-He-Meets’ Strider.” I touch the tender left side of my head with mild interest. “Now, as much as I love giving Cubeology lectures, I kinda did hit my head, so…”

D scrambles to his feet before I can even think about standing. Hal excuses himself, likely to go experiment with his new knowledge, so D ends up making sure I don’t have a concussion. He wheedles a promise that I’ll _tell_ him if I start to freak out again, but I’m dubious about whether I’d actually be capable of that.

I can feel every twist his thoughts take his emotions down. I try to tune it out, but that was the whole point of the scramblers. It gives me my privacy when Jesse comes by and everyone else privacy from me. I’m out of practice.

I have to get them running again as soon as possible.


	15. February 2016, 29

“How can you stand this place?”

Dominic rests his head on a hand, slouched down on the desk I stole from Furnace. At least this is just laziness rather than that habit of curling in on himself he picked up. He watches me like a hawk, though, bored eyes only moving to my face when my hands stop moving.

I stare down at the wires forming and dissolving around my fingers. I’m not sure how long I’ve been working on this. I don’t know how long Dominic’s been watching me, or how long I’ve been roaming the wending roads of my own thoughts. I’ll have to have j355 analyze—

J355 is gone.

“What do you mean?”

He shifts, and I wave my hand to send the new device to the back. I should start actually paying attention to people. I catch the tail end of his gesture at the lab itself. I peer around, but it’s the same as always. Messy now there’s no one cleaning up after me. The bright light of the unseen fluorescents keep everything lit, nothing left to the imagination. No one could sneak up on me here.

“It’s just—” He stops. His fingers drum against the desk, and I end up looking back to him before he speaks again. “Maybe it’s the lights. Or the coat. I don’t know. It doesn’t bother you?”

I flick another glance into the lab and half expect his father to be waiting for me to catch sight of him. He’s not there, of course, but bile still rises in my throat. Well, now it does.

“Does it bother _you?_ ” I ask instead.

He shrugs.

“Nothing ever happened to _me_ in the lab.” He pairs that with a look too loaded not to acknowledge.

The familiar ‘this is what I’m good at’ _almost_ comes out, but Dominic deserves better than that. He deserves better than a deflection, and I know he would recognize it as exactly that. I keep my gaze far away from him, going so far as to turn in my chair, when I allow myself to talk.

“I get to make what I want here.” I pause only for a moment before breaking one of my own rules. “What I do might not be better than what he did, but it’s still my decision. Clones. Screwing with the timelines. It’s a mess.”

He stays quiet. Too long. I don’t know how long I wait before peeking over at him. 

He watches me with narrowed eyes. I can’t read it at all. The idea of judgment blurs with the lazy way he lounges in his own chair. The limp fold of his hands on the desk.

Eventually, he sighs.

“What cl—”

A door slams in the hall leading to the Cube, and I jump to my feet. Dominic spins his chair around and makes a sound in the back of his throat when Connor pushes through the double doors.

“Jesse wants to go back to Furnace.”

 _“What?”_ we say together.

“I know.” He drops into a chair, his gaze unfocused. “They said it like it’d be a treat, or something. A vacation.”

“They do remember what happened last time?”

He throws his hands up with an unintelligible sound.

Dominic turns back to me when Connor jumps back up to start pacing. I haven’t seen actual fear on him since the compound, and the fact that he wears it now isn’t lost on me. I drift closer to rest a hand on his head. Comfort extraordinaire, it is me.

It seems to help, though. His jaw unclenches, at the very least.

“I don’t know if I can say no to them.” Connor traps his fidgeting hands behind his head. “Even if I do, I doubt I could actually stop them from going.”

“You could, if you really wanted to.”

He stops dead and stares at me.

“Please tell me you don’t mean that.”

“I’m just saying, you could stop them if you were willing to go that far.” I watch him, but I’m a little more focused on Dominic, the one who’s now inching his way toward the door. I’d get out of here, too, if I could. “The fact that you don’t want to says a lot about how much you’ve changed. Will you go with them?”

“Yeah.” He closes his eyes, pained. “I would kind of rather die, but I’ll go with them if they want me to.”

“You need to think about you, too. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice yourself for them.”

He shakes his head and turns on his heel to continue his back and forth.

“They shouldn’t go in there on their own,” he says. “I owe them this.”

“To be completely honest, you don’t owe them shit.” I flick a glance at Dominic, who just reached the wall. “You left to protect them, even if it didn’t work and it was _stupid_. You gave a lot up for them and you should think about what you need now that you’re back.”

“I can think about me when Jess does whatever it is they need to do in Furnace.”

This isn’t healthy, but I’m hardly one to talk. I shrug it off.

“Do what you have to do.”

Dominic has the door open when Connor seems to actually see him for the first time. He jabbers unintelligibly, effectively freezing him in place.

“You’re on the list.” He digs a paper out of his pocket. “One of the people I’m supposed to ask to come with us. Please don’t make me be the only other Cube native in there.”

Dominic stares at him, then at me.

I barely manage not to shake my head. Who am I to tell him not to do something? A Cubeologist who lets him crash in my lab sometimes? We have a shared experience, that doesn’t give me any say in what he does.

Instead, I shrug.

He jerks his head in a nod.

I wonder if this is how D feels when the kids he watches over put themselves in direct danger. I can’t argue, though. I don’t have a right to tell him not to go. I’m not his parent.

So, I watch helplessly as they walk directly out of the lab without another word to me. I keep my warnings to myself. Connor’s proven he won’t listen to reason. Dominic doesn’t need me telling him what to do.

I suppose I’ll have time to focus on my new program, then.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be adding more tags, fandoms, warnings, etc. as I post new chapters. Please make sure you mind the tags because uh. Yeah. All of this is also posted on my tumblr, panticwritten.


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